Journal: OR Spectrum, Submission Deadline: 31 December 2008

Consumers require high quality, safe, healthy and convenient food. Focus shifts to fresh as well as more value-added ready-to-eat products. As a result, the product variety has increased significantly. The food sector shows a number of distinct features such as the susceptibility of agricultural production to environmental impact factors such as the climate, an often rapidly declining quality of the products, production processes which show both continuous and batch characteristics, the generation of by-products and severe food safety and sustainability requirements.
In close cooperation with engineering and the natural sciences, Operations Research can contribute substantially to the decision making for numerous specific problems arising in the food sector. It may also support the current industry efforts of a farm-to-fork integration in food supply chains. The primary objective of this special issue is to reflect the recent developments made in this respect and to examine research issues concerned with the analysis and decision support at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels. Read the rest of this entry »

Many real-world decision-making situations arise from agriculture and from forest management. Models and decision support systems to be used in agriculture or forestry are often presented at OR international conferences and workshops. Even though most presentations contain a section called “Validation” or “Discussion” those issues are often treated rather superficially. In other words, many presentations describe carefully what the program or model does, but they only briefly stress why and how it does it. The purpose of this volume is to focus on the methods in the context of the problems they are intended to solve. Read the rest of this entry »