Client Selection And Combination For Farm Perishable Products

This paper deals with the problem of selecting the most profitable combination of clients to sell a given perishable production of a vegetable farm. A farmer has pre-qualified a pool of potential clients, characterized by specific product mixes, prices, supply contract durations and farm workers requirements to prepare and deliver the order. The farmer is allowed to purchase products from surrounding farms to meet the contracts specifications, if the farm production is not sufficient. We present a Mixed Integer Linear Programming model to maximize the profit of farm sales with production and workforce capacities. We develop submodels to describe the demand characteristics of four targeted clients categories: farmers' market, community supported agriculture, contract demand and wholesalers. Theoretical complexity of the model and preliminary computational results are discussed. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.