A Decision Support System For Efficient Crop Production Supply Chain Management

This paper presents a decision support system for efficient and responsive crop production supply chain management, which captures harvesting, transportation and storage activities, through taking a holistic perspective as a whole. Crop production represents one of the most significant stage in agricultural sector for both agricultural cooperatives and individual farmers, due to its high cost and considerable impact on crop quality and yield. Whilst considering the dynamic behaviour and the intricacy of the studied agricultural system, combined discrete event simulation and optimization approaches, scenario analysis and performance measurement tools are implemented for supporting decision making for cooperatives and individual farmers, respectively. Likewise, it enables to examine and evaluate alternative system re-configurations and strategies for an eventual supply chain rethinking or redesign. The decision support system proves to be particularly responsive and effective when applied to a real life agricultural case study.