An integrated sizing and planning problem in designing diverse vegetable farming systems

Abstract

To support the short food supply chain development in cities, we propose a diverse vegetable farm design model to maximise the farm revenue in response to clients' daily demands in local fresh fruits and vegetables. The model supports decision in creating or adapting farms within or around cities with viable business models. To the best of our knowledge, our model is a first attempt to integrate strategic and tactical decisions on multi-techniques, multi-products and multi-clients production systems. Integrating strategic and tactical decisions, we obtain new solutions that could not be obtained by separating the two decision levels, due to product short-time perishability constraints: on-plot and cold-room storage, loss functions and price reduction. We define a specific formulation of the production methods in the model to consider both cultivation and harvest tasks that compete for limited and expensive labour resource. This paper presents the mixed integer linear programme we develop, as well as graphical and computational results. We have been able to find relevant solutions on a real farm case study that demonstrates the interest of using short time-paces for the strategic sizing of a farm growing fresh perishable products.