Abstract
Abstract. Intensive livestock production might have a negative environmental impact, by producing large amounts of animal excrements, which, if not properly managed, can contaminate nearby water bodies with nutrient excess. However, if animal manure is exported to distant crop fields, to be used as organic fertilizer, pollution can be mitigated. It is a single-objective optimization problem, in regards to finding the best solution for the logistics process of satisfying nutrient crops needs by means of livestock manure. This paper proposes a dynamic approach to solve the problem, based on a decentralized nature-inspired cooperative technique, inspired by the foraging behavior of ants (AIA). Results provide important insights for policy-makers over the potential of using animal manure as fertilizer for crop fields, while AIA solves the problem effectively, in a fair way to the farmers and well balanced in terms of average transportation distances that need to be covered by each livestock farmer. Our work constitutes the first application of a decentralized AIA to this interesting real-world problem, in a domain where swarm intelligence methods are still under-exploited.
Highlights
The central role of the agricultural sector is to provide adequate and high-quality food to an increasing human population, which is expected to be increased by more than 30% by 2050 (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2009)
This paper proposes a nature-inspired method to solve the issue of transporting manure from livestock farms to crop fields, to be used as fertilizer in the territory of Catalonia
It presents the findings obtained by solving the problem of manure transport optimization using ant-inspired algorithm (AIA)
Summary
The central role of the agricultural sector is to provide adequate and high-quality food to an increasing human population, which is expected to be increased by more than 30% by 2050 (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2009). This means that a significant increase in food production must be achieved. Agriculture is considered as an important contributor to the deterioration of soil, water contamination, as well as air pollution and climate change (Bruinsma, 2003), (Vu et al, 2007). Catalonia is one of the European regions with the highest livestock density, according to the agricultural statistics for 2016, provided by the Ministry of Agriculture, Government of Catalonia, with reported numbers of around 7M pigs, 1M cattle and 32M poultry in a geographical area of 32,108 km
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