Collaborative Plan to Reduce Inequalities Among the Farms Through Optimization

Abstract

The crop planning problem consists in defining the crop and acreage to be planted at each farm. There are several centralized mathematical programming models to support crop planning in literature. However, centralized solutions often produce economic unfairness among the members of the supply chain, being especially relevant among the farmers in the agri-food sector. To solve it, this paper tries to answer the following research question: is it possible to reduce inequalities among the farmers through a collaborative plan? A centralized multi-objective mathematical programming model to support crop planning and the next decisions up to the sale of vegetables through a collaborative plan is proposed to answer this question. To show the validity of the proposed collaborative plan, results obtained are compared against those obtained without collaboration. The analysis of results shows that inequalities among the supply chain members can be highly reduced in a centralized decisionmaking approach by implementing the proposed collaborative plan, reducing a bit the supply chain profit.

Mitigating Environmental Impact of Perishable Food Supply Chain by a Novel Configuration: Simulating Banana Supply Chain in Sri Lanka

“…Various studies have been performed on finding approaches to make the perishable food supply chain sustainable. Economic sustainability has been studied, focusing on productivity [6][7][8][9][10][11], profit [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], cost [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], and revenue optimization [41,42].…”