Mohammadali Abedini
National Centre for Ports and Shipping, Australian Maritime College, University of Tasmania, Launceston.
Title: Title: Integrated vegetable production planning considering crop rotation rules using a mathematical mixed integer programming model
Biography
Biography: Mohammadali Abedini
Abstract
In this paper a mathematical optimisation model was developed to maximise the profit in a vegetable production planning problem. It serves as a decision support system that assists farmers in land allocation to crops and harvest scheduling decisions. The developed model can handle different rotation rules in two consecutive cycles of production which is a common practice in organic production system. Moreover, different production methods of the same crop were considered in the model formulation. The main strength of the model is that it is not restricted to predetermined production periods, which makes the planning more flexible. The model is classified as a mixed integer programming (MIP) model and formulated in PYOMO - a Python package to formulate optimisation models- and solved via Gurobi and CPLEX optimiser packages. The model was tested with secondary data from “Australian vegetable growing farms” and the results were obtained and discussed with the computational test runs. The results show that the model can successfully provide reliable solutions for real size problems.