•The scheduling of equipment under a sharing resource system is first studied.•The ALNS metaheuristics employing the idea of DE is developed to solve the problem.•The new destroy and repair methods have been developed as unique and effective. This paper presents the ALNS metaheuristics, employing the idea of DE to solve the mechanical harvester assignment and routing problem with time windows (HARPTW) to maximize the total area serviced by a mechanical harvester under a sharing infield resource system. The effective ALNS is designed to solve large-scale problems integrating the mechanical harvester assignment problem (HAP) and the mechanical harvester routing problem (HRP). The newly developed destroy and repair methods are unique and effective. Additionally, four new formulas have been developed to calculate the probability to accept the worse solution using linear and parabola functions instead of the exponential function that is used mostly in the literature. The numerical results show that the parabola function, which uses the information about the solution quality, outperforms all other proposed heuristics. This demonstrates that the proposed heuristics are very efficient and are not only useful for reducing the infield operations costs of small growers, but also for efficient management of the inbound logistics equipment and machinery of the sugarcane supply system.