All posts by Daniel Sandars

The purpose of Daniel Sandars' current work is to inform UK policy on biodiversity and arable agriculture by providing decision analysis methods and related quantified evidence base. The aim is to identify, develop as necessary, and apply methods which develop the linear programming approach to agricultural production planning to include effects on exemplar indicator species of farmland birds and mammals together with the associated decision making behaviour of farmers. The resulting approach will identify and quantify how farmers respond to changes in the financial, regulatory, climatic and technological environment, especially with respect to initiatives to promote biodiversity. It will be capable of rapid recalculation and easy adaptation to evaluate future, as yet unspecified, choices and changes. In general he applies a variety of modelling and operational research techniques, which often require considerable methodological innovation to succeed (be fit for purpose).
Abstracts

Recent papers

Agricultural countermeasures in nuclear emergency management: a stakeholders’ survey for multi-criteria model development
Turcanu, C; Carle, B; Hardeman, F
JOURNAL OF THE OPERATIONAL RESEARCH SOCIETY 59 (3): 305-312 MAR 2008

Information and its management for differentiation of agricultural products: The example of specialty coffee
Niederhauser, N; Oberthur, T; Kattnig, S; Cock, J
COMPUTERS AND ELECTRONICS IN AGRICULTURE 61 (2): 241-253 MAY 2008

Procedure for the classification and characterization of farms for agricultural production planning: Application in the Northwest of Spain
Riveiro, JA; Marey, MF; Marco, JL; Alvarez, CJ
COMPUTERS AND ELECTRONICS IN AGRICULTURE 61 (2): 169-178 MAY 2008

Wither agricultural DSS?
Matthews, KB; Schwarz, G; Buchan, K; Rivington, M; Miller, D
COMPUTERS AND ELECTRONICS IN AGRICULTURE 61 (2): 149-159 MAY 2008

Decision modelling for environmental protection: The contingent valuation method applied to greenhouse waste management
Parra, S; Aguilar, FJ; Calatrava, J
BIOSYSTEMS ENGINEERING 99 (4): 469-477 APR 2008

Special Journal Issues

An interesting tangent? or well outfield?

Call For papers

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies  (IJMSO)

Special Issue on: “Agricultural Metadata and Semantics”

A common vision that may serve as an enabler for sustainable development, environmental preservation and fighting hunger in the world is the involvement, collaboration and coordination of activities dealing with the production, organisation and exchange of agricultural knowledge. Numerous technical and subject experts are working on related topics, tackling with issues such as classifications and taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, thesauri, authority files, glossaries, metadata specifications and their application profiles, as well as ontology-driven applications.
Continue reading An interesting tangent? or well outfield? →

Conferences

OR50: Agriculture and Natural Resources

We are moving close to the point where to conference database will be polled for titles and authors to use in the invitational program.  The call for papers remains up until at least the end of June.  We currently have 14 submissions in our stream and a few that we know are in the pipe line. We probably represent around 7-10% of the conference activity at this stage.

The OR SOCIETY

Lluis Pla and myself are leading two plenary debates where we raise issues from agriculture and set them into a wider OR debate, each lasting around 90minutes.  The deabtes will be transcribed by the OR society for publication in OR INSIGHT, the society’s magazine. The titles are:

1) Sustainability! Cometh the hour, cometh the Operational Researcher?

2) Strategic Applied OR: Wither Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries, etc or wither not?

Within the setting of the conference we will also be holding meeting for EWG-ORAFM and for the UK Special Interest Group

OR Society, SIG Agriculture & Natural Resources

Green light for UK group

The OR Society

The OR society has given us the go ahead to reinstate the old Agriculture and Related Industries Special Interest Group as a new group for Agriculture and Natural resources.  As a special interest group we hope to facilitate a fraternity of researchers and prationers working at the interfaces of modelling, economcs and or engineering.  Within this context we will hold meetings where we hope to engage with people whose work is of interest to OR but who may not themselves be interst in full on OR.

See our weblink http://www.orsoc.org.uk/orshop/(waoaju5511gj0w555ncjb445)/orcontent.aspx?inc=agricult.htm

Newsletter

ORAFM Launch their e-newsletter

orafm logo

Dear ORAFM member,
it is a pleasure to announce the launchment of our

Click NewsLetter

.
It is an internal document edited by/for the members of the group to keep
us informed of the MOST important NEWS concerning us (as ORAFM group).

At a glance, you’ll see the latest news. In this first number, the
preparation of the stream within OR50, the meeting of the group and the
EURO Summer Institute in 2009. Don’t miss it!
Best wishes,

L.M. Plà
Coordinator of the EURO WG ORAFM
 

http://www.orafm.org

PS. It intends also to avoid multiple emails giving redundant
informations. We plan to edit one each one or two months. All of you can
contribute sending to the editorial team your comments and news.

Conferences, General OR

Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN Conference

    Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN Conference

                              LION 3
                                  

                14-18 January, 2009. Trento, Italy

              More details and up-to-date information at
                www.intelligent-optimization.org/LION3

                                  
Building on the success of the previous editions we are organizing a new event for January 2009. The LION conference is aimed at exploring the boundaries and uncharted territories between machine learning, artificial intelligence, mathematical programming and algorithms for hard optimization problems. The main purpose of the event is to bring together experts from these areas to discuss new ideas and methods, challenges and opportunities in various application areas, general trends and specific developments.

The conference program will consist of plenary presentations, introductory and advanced tutorials, technical presentations, and it will give ample time for discussions.

Relevant Research Areas
========================

LION 3 solicits contributions dealing with all aspects of learning and intelligent optimization. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

– Stochastic local search methods and meta-heuristics
– Hybridizations of constraint and mathematical programming with
meta-heuristics
– Supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning applied to
heuristic search
– Reactive search (online self-tuning methods)
– Algorithm portfolios and off-line tuning methods
– Algorithms for dynamic, stochastic and multi-objective problems
– Interface(s) between discrete and continuous optimization
– Experimental analysis and modeling of algorithms
– Theoretical foundations
– Parallelization of optimization algorithms
– Memory-based optimization
– Prohibition-based methods (tabu search)
– Memetic algorithms
– Evolutionary algorithms
– Dynamic local search
– Iterated local search
– Variable neighborhood search
– Swarm intelligence methods (ant colony optimization, particle swarm
optimization etc.)
Continue reading Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN Conference →

Conferences

The Second International Conference on Computer & Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA2008)

The Second International Conference
on Computer & Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA2008)
October 18th-20th, 2008 Beijing, China

Dear Sir/Madam,
We are pleased to inform you that the Second International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA2008) will be held in Beijing, China in October 18-20, 2008. The URL Address is http://www.iccta.cn.
The conference will focus on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture and targeted participants are from universities, institutes, research organizations, government, large companies, and regional development agencies and consultants all over the world. The conference will provide a forum for original research contributions and practical system design, implementation, and applications of computer and computing technologies in agriculture.
All accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of CCTA 2008. Selected best papers will be published in a special issue of the International Journals (we have applied, and will let you know the results as soon as possible). Other papers will be published in the IFIP Series in Spinger Press in USA, which was listed in ISI Proceedings.
All abstracts should be submitted to the Secretary of the Conference at ccta2008@sina.com, by not later than February 29, 2008.

Topics and areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following Technologies in Agriculture:
Applied Mathematics
Numerical Analysis
Simulation, Optimization, Modeling
Systems Theory
Circuits and Systems
Neural Networks
Fuzzy Systems
Optimization
Multidimensional Systems
Computing & Computational Science
Statistics
Telecommunications
Signal Processing
Computer Science
Multimedia
Wireless and Optical Communications
Agricultural Decision Support System and Expert System
GIS, GPS, RS and Precision Farming
Agricultural System Simulation
Intelligent Monitoring and Control
ICT applications in Rural Area
Continue reading The Second International Conference on Computer & Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA2008) →

OR Society, SIG Agriculture & Natural Resources

Operation Research Society Special Interest Group

OR Society Logo

OR society Special Interest Group proposal

http://www.theorsociety.com

Title: Agriculture and natural resources

 Scope: We aim to encapsulate the management of all of the biotic primary production industries (agriculture, forestry, fisheries, etc) and their underpinning natural resources (soils, water, ecosystems, etc), at policy, strategic and tactical levels.  This definition includes the production of goods and [ecosystem] services as well as their related chains or webs of secondary industries and logistics.  It is application orientated and not restricted to any particular method.  Some of these methods will, of necessity, have been applied in a very innovative manner.

 The governance and management of these industries place this area at the vanguard of operational research’s contribution to sustainability.  This Special Interest Group offers a platform for those working on such issues.

 Purpose

Generally, to further the OR Society’s charitable objectives: All activities will be directed towards the furtherance of these objectives, which are:

  1. the advancement of the knowledge and interest of Operational Research, and
  2. the advancement of the education of Operational Research.

 Specifically, the aim is to create a fraternity of practitioners and academics within our scope to:

  • Encourage the practice of OR
  • Publicise the application of OR and thus elevate its profile amongst stakeholders
  • Advance the science and application of OR

Activities

As a minimum, we will hold a general meeting every two years.

 2008-2009 Plan for relaunch

The aim of the relaunch phase is to obtain sufficient interest to enable the group to hold at least one half day technical meeting per year.

The proposed chair and secretary are currently working closely with the EURO Working Group on Operational Research in Agriculture and Forest Management (EWG-ORAFM see http://www.orafm.org) to organise to agriculture and natural resources stream at OR50.

 

The abstracts of this stream, and future technical meetings, will be published as an abstract of communication in the Journal of Agricultural Science, Cambridge to further promote our activities and their science.

 In part the OR50 conference stream will be a partial relaunch meeting, but given the costs of the conference package it should not be the only meeting.  One other relaunch meeting with technical content is planned in the first 12 months.  This will double up as a general meeting.  It remains to be seen if it can be free to attend because the geographic sparsity of those working in this field it is anticipated that meetings will need to include lunch to justify the travel involved.  The anticipated date for this meeting is February 2009

Conferences, Meetings

OR 50 Discounted Attendence Rates

Members of the Operational Research Society and proven Members of affiliated EURO national OR Societies (http://www.euro-online.org/display.php?page=societies&) can claim discounted fees of around 20%. 

Students recieve a discount of c. 70% 

Also see the very restricted Assisted Places Scheme with deadline of 30th June

http://www.orsoc.org.uk/orshop/(nusgkj55o3zmft45bu5di5fy)/orcontent.aspx?inc=or50_assisted.htm

Conferences, Meetings

Call for papers OR50 (York 9-11 Sept 2008)

 The Operational Research SocietyAgriculture and natural resources stream

This is both a call for papers for a stream at OR50 (see attached) and an invitation to help relaunch this OR society special interest group.
An initiative is underway to rejuvenate interest in this topical area which also involves prominent Operational Research professionals Eric Audsley (Cranfield University) and Tahir Rehman (Reading University). In this endeavour we are strategically collaborating with Lluis Plà (University of Lleida), the coordinator of EWG-ORAFM (EURO working group on Operational Research in Agriculture and Forest Management)
Our scope aims to encapsulate the management of all of the biotic primary production industries (agriculture, forestry, fisheries, etc) and their underpinning natural resources (soils, water, ecosystems, etc), at policy, strategic and tactical levels. This definition includes the production of goods and [ecosystem] services as well as their related chains or webs of secondary industries and logistics. It is application orientated and not restricted to any particular method. Some of these methods will, of necessity, have been applied in a very innovative manner.Additionally, the governance and management of these industries place this area at the vanguard of operational research’s contribution to sustainability. We offer a platform for those working on such issues.

Dates:

Papers can be accepted for presentation at any stage before the conference, but bear in mind these dates to obtain maximum impact and publicity.

  1. As Soon As Possible submit a working title and authors
  2. By 25th April submit a finalized title and authors for inclusion in the invitational programme
  3. By 1st July submit a finalized 250 word abstract for the conference handbook

 

Abstracts are submitted via the OR society’s website  http://www.theorsociety.com

Attendence fees are discuounted to members of the Operational Research society and to the affiliated societies within EURO

In addition to meeting at OR50 a relaunch event is planned for February 2009. Send expressions of interest in this special interest group to Daniel Sandars, Cranfield University, e-mail daniel.sandars@cranfield.ac.uk

 

 

Â