Space minimization in agricultural production planning by column generation

Jalila Sadki-Fenzar (1) , Laurent Alfandari (2) , Agnès Plateau (3) , Anass Nagih (4)

1 LIPN - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris-Nord
2 ESSEC Business School
3 CEDRIC - Centre d'études et de recherche en informatique et communications
4 LITA - Laboratoire d'Informatique Théorique et Appliquée

We deal in this paper with an agricultural production planning problem where crops must be scheduled on land plots so as to satisfy crop demands every period of time and to minimize the overall surface of land used for cultivation. This problem can be formulated as a covering integer program with a huge number of variables. A resolution scheme based on column generation is thus proposed, where the resulting pricing problem is efficiently solved by dynamic programming. The numerical experiments show that the method is all the more so efficient and robust as the planning horizon is long and plot sizes are small.

Domaines: Recherche opérationnelle [math.OC]

Jalila Sadki-Fenzar, Laurent Alfandari, Agnès Plateau, Anass Nagih. Space minimization in agricultural production planning by column generation. 2010. ⟨hal-00576525⟩