A Hybrid Optimisation Model for Land Allocation and Storage Sizing in Agro-Food System

Agro-food systems refer to activities involved from the production to consumption of food products. The systems face challenges in production planning to satisfy the increase in food demand and changes in consumption patterns. Capacity expansion in agro-food systems is often necessary, and requires careful consideration of new land resource allocation. In particular, this issue carries significance since addition of new lands may entail production delay as well as greenhouse gas emissions from land use. One of the key challenges in agricultural production planning is to handle the demand dynamics with minimum allocation of land resources to achieve maximum profit. This work develops an automated targeting model to determine an optimal agricultural production plan that would require minimum new land resource and achieve maximum profit in satisfying the targeted demand. Also, this work explores the impact of optimal storage sizing on new land allocation, greenhouse gas emissions, and profit. The developed model is demonstrated with an oil palm case study under three scenarios—no storage, full storage, and partial storage.