A goal programming approach for farm planning with resources dimensionality

Abstract

Crop production entails many decision making processes aimed at improving productivity and achieving the best yield from scarce resources, which are normally limited. Assuming that there is a certain technical path of tasks to be carried out within a period, and that each task can be done in different ways, the problem addressed in this paper consists of choosing how and when to carry out each one, in such a way that the tasks are scheduled in sequence at the lowest possible cost, taking account of any relations of precedence among them, and in such a way that each task is done within its time window and with the resources being assigned in a feasible way. Time windows are usually defined in a strict way, and thus, if adjusted, can be a cause of infeasibility for some of the problems, implying the need to acquire new resources. Nevertheless, in most cases small deviations from time windows could be acceptable. In this paper a mixed 0-1 programming model to attain the proposed objective is proposed, applying goal programming to model time windows in a more flexible way.