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 »

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 »

EEPA Awards 2009: The guidelines of this award can be seen here.

EDDA Awards 2009: The guidelines of this award can be seen here.

The MSSIP Prize is awarded for an outstanding innovative contribution to Management Science/OR. In 2009, it will be awarded at the EURO 2009 Conference in Bonn (Germany)

The submitted work should consist of a recent paper in which the theoretical result or the practical implementation is explained. The prize is sponsored by SAP AG (12000 Euro).

Submissions in electronic form should be sent before 1 January 2009 to the Chair of the jury:

Jens Clausen
Professor of Operations Research and Chief Analyst.
Technical University of Denmark and DSB S-tog a/s
jc [Email address: jc #AT# imm.dtu.dk - replace #AT# with @ ] and jenclausen [Email address: jenclausen #AT# s-tog.dsb.dk - replace #AT# with @ ]

Information and guidelines of this prize can be seen here.

The start of the next meeting of our working group is close. For information about sessions etc. see the OR50 website.

As some of you properly noticed a new working group web-site has been set up. All members of ORAFM have been added as subscribers to the site and will receive an email when updates are added to the site.

If you prefer not to receive an email you can change this under your profile -> your subscriptions. Your password can be gained by following the ‘Lost your password?‘ link.

Best regards

ORAFM working board

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.