A summer school about OR in Agriculture and Forest Management will be held in Lleida, Spain, July 25th - August 8th 2009

Aims and Scope

Spanning the bridge between optimization theory and primary sector applications (mainly Agriculture and Forestry, but also Fisheries and Natural Resources in general) is one of the big challenges for the operations research community. Stochastic optimization and modern software implementations have become an indispensable resource in engineering sciences and economics. This high demand in interdisciplinary collaboration is, however, not adequately covered in most of the current curricula programs in applied mathematics or (agronomic/forest) engineering.

Aim of this EURO Summer Institute is to bring together young scientists with academic experts on OR methods besides the development of applications for Agriculture, Forestry and related industries of the primary sector. Read the rest of this entry »

David Parsons send me the proceedings of the 1. ORAFM meeting (EWDA-04) at Silsoe Research Institute, 27-28 September 2004. Titles include

• Crop rotation modelling, Nina Detlefsen
• A procedure for estimating long-term change in farm systems –
  an application to irrigation in East Anglia, Eric Audsley.
• Optimising Routes in the Logistic Planning of an Agribusiness
  Company, Sergio Ubeda.
• Application of a dynamic linear programming model on an ex post
  impact assessment analysis – The case of spineless cactus in
  alley cropping in Central Tunisia, Véronique Alary.
• Stochastic Optimisation in Excel: An Application to Sub-Arctic
  Dairy Farming, Paul A. Feldman.
• Optimising the management of Striga hermonthica using
  stochastic dynamic programming, Eric Audsley.
• Risk aversion in Markov decision processes, Lars Relund Nielsen.
• Returns to split-sex feeding in pig fattening, Jarkko K. Niemi.
• A Markov Decision Process approach with Q-learning for
  the stand management problem, Frédérick Garcia.
• A simulation model for designing and sizing sow farms, Lluis Plà
• Real-time, model-based control of pig growth, David Parsons.
• Anticipation in agricultural production management, Roger Martin-Clouaire.
• MEASURES: a whole-farm linear programme with environmental interactions, Daniel Sandars.

All papers can be downloaded as a single zip file.

The Proceedings of the Second Meeting of the EURO Working group on Operational Research (OR) in Agriculture and Forest Management have been published in The Journal of Agricultural Science. It contains abstracts of communications. Read the rest of this entry »