Optimization Under Uncertainty in Sustainable Agriculture and Agrifood Industry (eBook)

This book explores optimization under uncertainty and related applications in agriculture, sustainable supply chains and the agrifood industry. Rapid changes in the primary sector are leading to more and more industrialized structures, which require optimization methods in order to cope with today's challenges. Addressing uncertainty in the agrifood industry may lead to more robust supply chain designs or to diversified risk. Sustainability requires interaction with the environmental or social sciences. 

This book bridges the gap between optimization theory, uncertainty, sustainability and primary-sector applications (mainly in the agriculture and food industry, but also fisheries, forestry and natural resources in general). Although it has been a major challenge for the operations research community, this urgently needed interdisciplinary collaboration is not adequately covered in most current curricula in applied mathematics, economics or (agronomic/industrial/forest) engineering. This book highlights research that can help fill this gap. 

The individual chapters cover applications of stochastic integer linear programming and multicriteria decision methods in agriculture. The topics addressed include uncertainty in areas such as the sugar cane industry, pig farming, and cold storage for perishable products. 

Large-scale sustainable food production is a growing concern; this book offers solutions to help meet global demand in agriculture by using and improving the methods of optimization theory and operations research.

Victor M. Albornoz holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics, an M.Sc. in Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. A Professor at the Departamento de Industrias, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, his focus areas include operations research in agriculture, optimization under uncertainty, and numerical optimization techniques. He is the author of over 40 publications in academic journals, book series and book chapters, and more than 80 contributions in conference proceedings. He is an Associate Editor of Pesquisa Operacional and regularly participates in the meetings and conferences of the ICHIO (Chilean Institute of Operations Research), ALIO (Latin-Ibero-American Association of Operations Research), EURO and INFORMS.

Alejandro Mac Cawley Vergara is an Associate Professor at the Industrial and System Engineering Department, part of the School of Engineering at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research focuseson the application of operations research and logistics methods to the management of natural resources and biological systems, specifically in the agricultural, health, and mining sectors. He holds a Ph.D. from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, with a specialization in Supply Chain Engineering. He also holds two master's degrees in Industrial Engineering, one from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and the other from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Lluís M. Plà-Aragonés is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics, University of Lleida (UdL), Spain and a Senior Researcher in the Pig Breeding research group at the Agrotecnio Center. His focus areas include operations research methods and data analytics as applied to agriculture and forest management, particularly simulation, dynamic programming, Markov decision processes and production planning. He has headed various research projects on these topicsand engaged in collaborations with private companies in the pig sector, yielding numerous papers published in academic journals. A member of SEIO and EURO, he currently coordinates the EURO working group Operational Research in Agriculture and Forest Management and the CYTED network on big data and decision support systems in agriculture.