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 »

The next official meeting of the WG is going to be held at the UK Operation Research Society’s OR 50 conference in York 9-11 September 2008. Call for papers can be seen here.

Dear member of the ORAFM working group

I hope you have had or are having good summer holidays. This post is just to inform you about different things that may be of your interest. The most important is the attached documet EUROmeeting.doc (edited by our colleague Daniels, many thanks to him) where main topics dealt in the meeting of the group in Prague are included. 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 »

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