Operational model for minimizing costs in agricultural production systems

Abstract

Due to the increase of global demand of agriculture and agro-industrial products, agriculture has undergone some changes in the stages of procurement, planning, planting, maintenance, harvesting, transport and distribution. The use of formal mathematical model has been employed to evaluate and implement improvement policies and strategies. In this paper, we present a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming Problem model to solve the planning of agricultural production systems in the stages of sowing, crop maintenance and harvesting. The objective function seeks to minimize the cost of resources and wastes generated in operations. The minimization is inspired by lean manufacturing wastes but newly applied in agricultural production. The proposed approach is validated using data for the planning of bananas farmers in the Caribbean region of Colombia. While a deterministic solution is obtained, sensitivity analyses are carried out to evaluate different scenarios for production based on surface response methodology.Model offers a reduction of cost near 59% of cost relationed with wastes of production, moreover, we can find an alternative for scheduling operations in agricultural production based in the most important resources and tasks required along of production in agriculture.