PONE-D-24-46846Multi-objective Optimization Method for Path Planning and Task Allocation in Farmland Land Levelling Based on an Improved NSGA-IIIPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Chen,

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Vedik Basetti, Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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4. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: [This study was supported by the Central Government Guiding Local Science and Technology Development Special Fund Project "Application and Promotion of Key Technologies for Integrated Water and Fertilizer Management in Desert Wheat" (ZYYD2024CG19); the Ministry of Science and Technology Innovation 2030 Major Project on "New Generation Artificial Intelligence"—"Integrated Application and Demonstration of Key Technologies for Smart Farms" (2022ZD0115805); and the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Major Science and Technology Special Project "Research on Intelligent Control System for Integrated Water and Fertilizer Management in Farmland" (2022A02011-3).]. Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

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7. "Please ensure that you refer to Figure 1 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure.

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The article titled “Multi-objective Optimization Method for Path Planning and

Task Allocation in Farmland Land Levelling Based on an Im-proved NSGA-III”, relates to my area of interest that’s why I recommend some points which may help in order to improve the readability as well as overall structure of this manuscript. The following are my suggestions, recommendations and questions for this article which may help to improve the quality of this manuscript are as follows.

1. Title

- What’s the novelty of this article

- Need to summarise the abstract

2. Abstract

• Background of your proposed framework may be more elaborated

• Must use the contrast word i.e., on one hand and on the other hand.

• By using the proposed system/model/control technique, how can you relate that your work is efficient than the other techniques must add contrast in it.

3. Proper Structure is required

• Introduction must be divided in to four sections 1. Motivation 2. Related Work 3. Your contributions 4. Organisation of this manuscript

• After introduction must add another heading Problem statement and its proposed solution

4. Introduction (revision is required in this section)

• Background of the area may be elaborated more

• Put some pictures related to the area of study

• Problem statement and solution are missing

5. Major Grammar Issues

Emphasising clarity

• Reducing reliance on pronouns and determiners, such as ’this’, ’that’, ’it’, ’their’, etc., improves the readability of an academic paper.

Depersonalising sentences

• In academic writing, instead of using first-person pronouns, such as ’I’ and ’We’, focusing on actions is preferable. Please note the following examples.

Lexical Issues

• 2.1. ’such as’ instead of ’like’

• Correct use of ’as’

• ’complete’ instead of ’whole’

Articles

• Mastering articles can be a challenge for non-native speakers, but Figure 1 offers a helpful guide (Please see Schrampfer (2016) for more detail).

• Example

Xyz denotes operational expenses directly related to the controller operation. ✗

xyz denotes operational expenses directly related to controller operation. ✓

6. System model (revision is required in this section)

• Describe your proposed model "sufficiently" detailed such that others can redo your experiment(s).

• Mathematical equations are not written appropriately. It must be simplified

• Big equations i.e., must be written in a curl bracket

• Recheck equation (13), it has issues

7. Algorithm

- Need to write in a proper way

8. Results and Discussions

• Comparison with some other experimental results are missing.

• Validation of the results is missing

• Need to compare with at-least two methods one is traditional and add another state of the art method in order to justify your proposed method.

9. Figures & tables

• Need to add more figures as “a picture is worth a thousand words?”

Figure 1 need to remake

• Visibility of figures are not appropriate use a proper software like “inkscape” or so on.

• Method figure is worst need to remake

• Figure 4: Single-field path planning flow chart why make single field ? multi is best option here in order to validate the work

10. References

Check all the references carefully. Need to add more references. Some of the related reference written below may be cited and added in this section to further strengthen this work.

https://doi.org/10.3390/s21113820

10.1108/IJICC-02-2014-0005

General Comments

• Grammar is weak need to rewrite most the parts

• Background of the proposed area may elaborated more.

• Some observations in the introduction and system model part as I reflect it on point number 3 & 4 so kindly incorporate all those points accordingly.

• Result part must also be addressed as I mentioned in point number 5.

• Check all the references carefully and incorporate the above mentioned paper in your reference list.

• Must add multi UAV’s concept in this manuscript its missing

• Problem statement and its solution must be defined

Reviewer #2: 1. Please explain why the WOA algorithm is chosen in this paper. Specifically, it is recommended to discuss the advantages of this algorithm in solving certain problems and compare it with other optimization algorithms.

2. Please provide a comprehensive explanation of the rationale behind the assertion that six coordinates can accurately represent the boundaries of a parcel of land. This may necessitate an explication of geometric properties, the distribution of points, and their respective positions in space.

3. It is recommended that the authors provide a comprehensive explication of the denotation of each letter in Figure 3, as well as in other figures and equations.

4. The existing description of the fine-tuning stage of the BWO algorithm lacks sufficient detail. It is recommended that further elaboration be provided on this optimization stage, with a clear delineation of the specific processes and purposes of each step.

5. The unit of measurement is missing in Figure 12-15. The relevant unit information needs to be supplemented to improve the clarity and understandability of the figures.

Reviewer #3: 1 The main motivations of the proposed algorithm are not clear. The advantages and disadvantages of previous work should be discussed more comprehensively and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for solving existing problems should be emphasized.

2 The existing approaches should be classified into different types, and the advantages and disadvantages of each type should be clearly introduced.

3 There is not a part to express the novelty in the whole of the article. The reviewer cannot find whether the idea proposed in this paper is better than those in other papers. Please point out the novelty of the paper in the “Introduction” section.

4 The related work does not cover many contributions on path or mission planning. For example, Coverage Path Planning of Heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Ant Colony System, An adaptive clustering-based algorithm for automatic path planning of heterogeneous UAVs, Global-and-Local Attention-Based Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Behaviour Control of Multiple UAVs. All these works focus on the path or mission planning problem. It is suggested to cite the above article and analyze the differences.

5 In Section 4, description about the experiments is not perfect. Some experiment parameters should be introduced in this section such the readers know how to repeat the experiments and evaluate the experiment results. For example, how many times was each experiment run? Is each point in the tables represent the average value of several experiment results? Please add more sentences to introduce these parameters in the revised manuscript.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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A two-stage hybrid NSGA-III with BWO for path planning and task allocation in agricultural land preparation

PONE-D-24-46846R1

Dear Dr. Chen,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Vedik Basetti, Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: All my concern is already addressed by the authors, now I recommend to accept this article in its present from.

Reviewer #2: It is recommended to carefully check the information in each reference before submitting the final draft to ensure that the information is complete and in a uniform format.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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