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Perspectives of Operational Research for Modeling and Analysis of Agricultural Production Systems

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Operations Research and Analytics in Latin America

Abstract

Agriculture is experimenting economic and environmental challenges and the need to make decisions on improving performance and use of resources reductions as a priority. It is hence necessary to implement tools to aid decisions at strategic, tactical and operational levels. The current paper reviews existent literature with an emphasized on crop production systems and agricultural chain management, including planning, production, inventory management, and conditions of transport and distribution. The focus was planning, production techniques, operations and resources management. In contrast to narrative reviews, this paper follows a systematic protocol to avoid bias and allows replicability. Findings show that a high percentage of works emphases on hypothetical Operational Research (OR) models and optimization techniques that simplify the real problem with strong assumptions on isolated applied cases. These do not consider the integration of production, quality, food security, sustainability and risk conditions of a supply chain and many works only have been oriented to one echelon of the chain. Finally, the studies on agricultural production systems are based on some mathematical programming approaches, heuristics and artificial intelligence, but several are not applied or implemented in agricultural production. This paper also identifies key challenges and proposes opportunities for future research.

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Correspondence to Nestor E. Caicedo Solano .

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Solano, N.E.C., Llinás, G.A.G., Montoya-Torres, J.R. (2023). Perspectives of Operational Research for Modeling and Analysis of Agricultural Production Systems. In: Montoya-Torres, J.R., Guerrero, W.J., Cortés-Murcia, D.L. (eds) Operations Research and Analytics in Latin America. Lecture Notes in Operations Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28870-8_17

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