Optimization Models to Improve First Quality Agricultural Production Through a Collaboration Program in Different Scenarios

Ana Esteso (1) , M. M. E. Alemany (1) , Ángel Ortiz (1) , Pascale Zaraté (2, 3)

1 CIGIP - Centro de Investigación en Gestión e Ingeniería de Producción [Valencia]
2 IRIT-ADRIA - Argumentation, Décision, Raisonnement, Incertitude et Apprentissage
3 UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole

Consumers increasingly require products with higher qualities, leading to loss units not meeting these requirements. Collaboration can be used to increase first quality products production and reduce waste generated along the chain. A collaboration program consisting in a system of investments made by retailers to cooperatives to improve the skills of farms is proposed for this aim. The novelty of this paper is threefold: 1) the business model considered in which cooperatives distribute funds among farms, 2) the inclusion of the dynamic state of products, modelling the quality variation timewise, and 3) the mathematical modelling of five scenarios with different criteria for allocating funds to farms. Results are analyzed and compared for the three aspects of sustainability concluding that: 1) the collaboration program increases the quality of products sold, and 2) interesting tradeoffs occur among the sustainability dimensions, enabling the reduction of unfairness among farms by slightly worsening economic aspects.

Mots clés: Agri-food; Collaboration; Quality; Unfairness; Optimization

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Recherche opérationnelle [math.OC]

Ana Esteso, M. M. E. Alemany, Ángel Ortiz, Pascale Zaraté. Optimization Models to Improve First Quality Agricultural Production Through a Collaboration Program in Different Scenarios. 21st IFIP WG 5.5 Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE 2020), Nov 2020, Valencia, Spain. pp.546-559, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-62412-5_45⟩. ⟨hal-03176820⟩