Optimal Transport in Hand-Picked Agriculture

Presenter(s)

Richard Sowers

Abstract

We develop and analyze a model for scheduling transport for perishable products. In the field, fluctuations in harvest rate lead to uncertainty as to the optimal time to request transport to a cooling facility. While the harvested fruit is waiting in the field, it is decaying and losing quality. This leads to a question of balancing harvest quality vs quantity.

Our model is continuous in both time and quality, and leads to computationally solvable optimization problem which we can solve. We show some numerical results in some cases drawn from real observations.

Topic

Economics

Start Date

6-17-2016 8:50 AM

End Date

6-17-2016 9:10 AM

Room

High Country Conference Center

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Jun 17th, 8:50 AM Jun 17th, 9:10 AM

Optimal Transport in Hand-Picked Agriculture

High Country Conference Center

We develop and analyze a model for scheduling transport for perishable products. In the field, fluctuations in harvest rate lead to uncertainty as to the optimal time to request transport to a cooling facility. While the harvested fruit is waiting in the field, it is decaying and losing quality. This leads to a question of balancing harvest quality vs quantity.

Our model is continuous in both time and quality, and leads to computationally solvable optimization problem which we can solve. We show some numerical results in some cases drawn from real observations.