Discriminating Feed Rate of Combine Harvester by Using Association Rule Mining

The feed rate is an important evaluation index of combine harvester performance. The quick identification of the amount of feed rate that enters the combine during harvesting is of great significance for the efficiency and operational quality of the combine harvester. To address this issue, this study proposes a feed rate discrimination method based on association rule mining. A self-designed data acquisition system was designed, taking the wheat combine harvester as object, and collected seven speed signals and three torque signals when the feed rate was 6 kg/s similar to 8 kg/s, 8 kg/s similar to 10 kg/s, and 10 kg/s similar to 11 kg/s, respectively. The collected time series data were discretized so as to facilitate the construction of transaction sets. Then, the association rules in the constructed transaction set were mined by FP-Growth, and the rules with weak or no correlation with the increase in feed rate were filtered using min-support, min-confidence, and min-lift of 1.3, 0.8, and 3, respectively, to obtain strong association rules. Then, the strong association rules were constructed as classifiers. The test results showed that the accuracy of the constructed classifier for the identification of 6 kg/s similar to 8 kg/s, 8 kg/s similar to 10 kg/s, and 10 kg/s similar to 11 kg/s feed rates was 100 %, 96 %, and 98.7 %, respectively. Research results can provide a basis for the adjustment of the working state of the combine harvester.