The Optimal Harvest Decisions for Natural and Artificial Maturation Mangoes under Uncertain Demand, Yields and Prices

Sheng-I Chen and Wei-Fu Chen
Additional contact information
Sheng-I Chen: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, College of Management, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan
Wei-Fu Chen: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, College of Management, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 17, 1-17

Abstract: This study focuses on the decisions of picking, inventory, ripening, delivering, and selling mangoes in a harvesting season. Demand, supply, and prices are uncertain, and their probability density functions are fitted based on actual trading data collected from the largest spot market in Taiwan. A stochastic programming model is formulated to minimize the expected cost under the considerations of labor, storage space, shelf life, and transportation restrictions. We implement the sample-average approximation to obtain a high-quality solution of the stochastic program. The analysis compares deterministic and stochastic solutions to assess the uncertain effect on the harvest decisions. Finally, the optimal harvest schedule of each mango variety is suggested based on the stochastic program solution.

Keywords: fresh agricultural products; harvest schedule; stochastic programming; sample-average approximation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/17/9660/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/17/9660/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:17:p:9660-:d:623563

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().