Tag Archives: Wrest Park

50 Years of Applying OR to Agriculture in Britain

Audsley, E., & Sandars, D. L. (2008). A review of the practice and achievements from 50 years of applying OR to agricultural systems in Britain. 116–132. Scopus.

I helped my boss Eric Audsley produce this paper (link) for the OR Society 50 conference in York 2008.  Luis Pla and I also wrote a related paper on the future prospects that made it to press at the second attempt with help from Andrew Higgins.

Audsley, E., & Sandars, D. L. (2008). A review of the practice and achievements from 50 years of applying OR to agricultural systems in Britain. 116–132. Scopus. Cite

An engineering approach for sustainable systems

This paper summed up much of the thinking and research that I had been involved with for around a decade as a research scientist at the former Silsoe Research Institute at Bedfordshire. (Wrest Park is a fabulous Stately home and was a gorgeous setting for UKs public sector agricultural engineering institute)

In many ways I remain an heir to that legacy with the remaining team members at Cranfield University. My work lies under Systems Modelling for Decisions -mostly under 1 and 2, but dipping into the rest

Key headings from the paper

Systems Modelling for Decisions:

  1. Systems modelling for environmental
  2. Whole farm decisions and land use planning -the implications of farmers’ management decisions for environmental impacts
  3. Decision support for complex uncertain systems – stochastic dynamic programming and weed control strategies
  4. Linking process and systems models to support on-farm decision making – an example for fungicide does optimization

Control Engineering approaches to biological systems:

  1. Incorporating models in the control loop
  2. Control of multiple outputs -target growth but with limited emissions
  3. Advanced sensing techniques – a route to more complex control opportunities
    1. machine vision
    2. biological sensors
  4. Real-time machine control

Day, W., Audsley, E., & Frost, A. R. (2008). An engineering approach to modelling, decision support and control for sustainable systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 363(1491), 527–541. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.2168 Cite