A John Deere autonomous tractor is on display at CES 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. A John Deere autonomous tractor is on display at CES 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Like many parts of modern life, tractors have gone high-tech, often running on advanced computer systems. But some manufacturers are tight-lipped about how these electronics work, making it difficult or nearly impossible for farmers and independent repair shops to diagnose and fix problems with the equipment. An agreement by John Deere may finally give farmers a greater hand in repairing the company's products.

We are witnessing an exciting time in the automotive industry. As innovation is reaching new heights with connected and autonomous vehicles, the auto insurance industry is also experiencing its own evolution, using technology to enhance the way road accidents and damages are handled, saving people time and money and improving the often stressful experiences of handling the aftermath of accidents. A transformation is badly needed in the insurance industry. In addition to poor customer experiences when making claims, some $25 billion goes unaccounted for each year due to adjuster costs, fraud, delays in repair shops and more. Innovation can change that -- and it is already starting to.

Soon after the iPhone 13 was released, an iFixit teardown showed that Face ID stopped working if the display was replaced by a third-party repair shop, unless they transferred a microcontroller from the original screen. Apple will soon mitigate the issue with an upcoming software update, so Face ID will still function even without swapping the chip to the new display. "A solution will be available in an upcoming software update," Apple told Engadget. The Verge first reported on the forthcoming fix. Moving the microcontroller from the device's original screen to a replacement is no easy feat -- iFixit noted a microscope is needed.

In a new ruling that will take effect on Sunday, the Librarian of Congress has carved out a series of exemptions that allow people to legally circumvent digital "locks" on devices they own, such as voice assistants, tablets, smartphones and vehicles, to repair them. Motherboard earlier reported on the ruling. Device manufactures currently use digital protection measures to safeguard their intellectual property. The digital locks are intended to prevent the theft of intellectual property and to keep consumers from compromising their electronics, thereby preserving the integrity and security of a device's operating system, Industry groups have argued. The exemptions permit customers to unlock their smartphones and get around restrictions built into other mainstream devices, including smart home assistants, said to Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixit.

An undercover investigation showed video of an Apple Genius Bar employee in Canada telling a customer that the simple repair to his Apple computer would cost as much as a new computer. The National went undercover with a hidden camera to an Apple Store in Toronto to see what the employees would say about a laptop with a darkened screen. After the employee went into the back of the store to run a diagnostic he came back with a shocking price quote. The employee said the most of the computer had been damaged with water, and therefore the customer would need to either spend $1,200 (USD $927) to fix it, or for around the same price, get a new one. However, when the same computer was brought to a third party repair shop in New York, it took Luis Rossman at Rossman Repair Group under two-minutes to fix the darkened LCD screen by bending back a pin, and he says he would never have even charged someone for fixing it.

Like any farmer, Guy Mills Jr. has had his share of equipment trouble. In the past, Mills, who grows corn, soybean and alfalfa on his 3,810-acre farm in Ansley, Neb., would have fixed his machinery himself. But like so many essential tools, Mills' equipment has become so technologically complex that he needs outside help when it breaks down. Unfortunately for him, that help can eat up time and money, both of which have been in short supply. "If you have a bad alternator, they connect a computer to your tractor and it tells them the alternator is bad," says Mills, 57.

With the number of commercial drones expected to soar into the millions in the next few years, operators whose unmanned aircraft malfunction or crash will be looking for places to get them fixed. Some repair shops authorized by manufacturers to fix smaller drones are already having trouble keeping up with demand. For several weeks, a California company had a note posted on its website referring specifically to the Phantom drone: "Temporarily not accepting any new repairs at this time due to high volume. The message was recently removed. While such waits might be frustrating for operators, it spells opportunity for repair shops keen to diversify and budding drone mechanics who could start lucrative careers repairing commercial drones without having to pay for a four-year college degree. "I'm trying to hire two experienced drone technicians at $20 an hour and I can't find anybody," said James Barnes, who founded the New Jersey Drone Academy. "This gives kids in urban areas that can't go to college now a chance to work at a trade and make decent money." Northland Community and Technical College in Minnesota has been teaching unmanned aircraft maintenance for larger military-type drones. It is expanding its program to include smaller drone repair, and school officials are promising a high-paying job after just one or two years. "The reality is, the people coming out of the trade schools, the technical colleges, places like that, are the people out there getting jobs and they're getting paid nicely to do it," said Zack Nicklin, unmanned aircraft instructor at the school in Thief River Falls, Minn. Unmanned aircraft owners basically have three options when their drones need tune-ups or repairs. They can send it back to the manufacturer, send it to a repair shop or fix it themselves. Most smaller shops specialize in hobby grade or low-end commercial grade drones, specific to a few manufacturers. Those drones typically cost a few thousand dollars to buy, and about $150 to fix, not including parts. The more expensive commercial drones generally need repair experts, many of whom have backgrounds in manned aviation. Brad Hayden of Albuquerque, N.M., is president and CEO of Robotic Skies, which is building a network of affiliated repair stations around the world. He currently has more than 120 service stations, most of which work on higher-end drones that cost $10,000 and up, and he plans to recruit more shops, as needed. "The industry is always short of avionics technicians.

We address a dynamic repair shop scheduling problem in the context of military aircraft fleet management where the goal is to maintain a full complement of aircraft over the long-term. A number of flights, each with a requirement for a specific number and type of aircraft, are already scheduled over a long horizon. We need to assign aircraft to flights and schedule repair activities while considering the flights requirements, repair capacity, and aircraft failures. The number of aircraft awaiting repair dynamically changes over time due to failures and it is therefore necessary to rebuild the repair schedule online. To solve the problem, we view the dynamic repair shop as successive static repair scheduling sub-problems over shorter time periods. We propose a complete approach based on the logic-based Benders decomposition to solve the static sub-problems, and design different rescheduling policies to schedule the dynamic repair shop. Computational experiments demonstrate that the Benders model is able to find and prove optimal solutions on average four times faster than a mixed integer programming model. The rescheduling approach having both aspects of scheduling over a longer horizon and quickly adjusting the schedule increases aircraft available in the long term by 10% compared to the approaches having either one of the aspects alone.

We address a scheduling problem in the context of military aircraft maintenance where the goal is to meet the aircraft requirements for a number of missions in the presence of breakdowns. The assignment of aircraft to a mission must consider the requirements for the mission, the probability of aircraft failure, and capacity of the repair shop that maintains the aircraft. Therefore, a solution both assigns aircraft to missions and schedules the repair shop to meet the assignments. We propose a dispatching heuristic algorithm; three complete approaches based on mixed integer programming, constraint programming, and logic-based Benders decomposition; and a hybrid heuristic-complete approach. Experiments demonstrate that the logic-based Benders variation combining mixed integer programming and constraint programming outperforms the other approaches, that the dispatching heuristic can feasibly schedule the repair shop in a very short time, and that using the dispatching solution as a bound marginally improves the complete approaches.