Group Decision Support for agriculture planning by a combination of Mathematical Model and Collaborative Tool

TL;DR

This paper presents an innovative combined approach using centralized optimization and a group decision support system to facilitate consensus among farmers for agricultural planning decisions, tested with real farmers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of mathematical modeling and collaborative decision tools specifically for agricultural group decision making.

Findings

Successful application with real farmers demonstrates practical viability.

The combined method improves consensus and decision quality.

Laboratory and real-world experiments show consistent results.

Abstract

Decision making in the Agriculture domain can be a complex task. The land area allocated to each crop should be fixed every season according to several parameters: prices, demand, harvesting periods, seeds, ground, season etc... The decision to make becomes more difficult when a group of farmers must fix the price and all parameters all together. Generally, optimization models are useful for farmers to find no dominated solutions, but it remains difficult if the farmers have to agree on one solution. We combine two approaches in order to support a group of farmers engaged in this kind of decision making process. We firstly generate a set of no dominated solutions thanks to a centralized optimization model. Based on this set of solution we then used a Group Decision Support System called GRUS for choosing the best solution for the group of farmers. The combined approach allows us to determine the best solution for the group in a consensual way. This combination of approaches is very innovative for the Agriculture. This approach has been tested in laboratory in a previous work. In the current work the same experiment has been conducted with real business (farmers) in order to benefit from their expertise. The two experiments are compared.