Handbook of Operations Research in Agriculture and the Agri-Food Industry

The scope of this book is Operations Research methods in Agriculture and a thorough discussion of derived applications in the Agri-food industry. The book summarizes current research and practice in this area and illustrates the development of useful approaches to deal with actual problems arising in the agriculture sector and the agri-food industry.This book is intended to collect in one volume high quality chapters on Methods and Applications in Agriculture and Agri-food industry considering both theoretical issues and application results. Methods applied to problems in agriculture and the agri-food industry include, but are not restricted to, the following themes:Dynamic programmingMulti-criteria decision methodsMarkov decision processesLinear programmingStochastic programmingParameter estimation and knowledge acquisitionLearning from dataSimulationDescriptive and normative decision tree techniques, including: agent modelling and simulation, and state of the art surveysEach chapter includes some standard and traditional methodology but also some recent research advances. All the applications presented in the chapters have been inspired and motivated by the demands from the agriculture and food production areas.

Lluís M. Plà-Aragonès is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Lleida (UdL) and a Senior Researcher in the Animal Production Area at the UdL-IRTA Center. His research interests include operational research methods applied in agriculture and forest management, with special reference to simulation, dynamic programming, Markov decision processes and production planning. He coordinates the EURO working group called Operational Research in Agriculture and Forest management. He is also a member of INFORMS and EURO.