%0 Journal Article
%T An Optimal Control Framework for Resources Management in Agriculture
%A Fernando Lobo Pereira
%A Fernando Arm¨¦nio Fontes
%A Maria Margarida Ferreira
%A Maria do Ros¨¢rio Pinho
%A Vilma Alves Oliveira
%A Eduardo Costa
%A Geraldo Nunes Silva
%J Conference Papers in Science
%D 2013
%R 10.1155/2013/769598
%X An optimal control framework to support the management and control of resources in a wide range of problems arising in agriculture is discussed. Lessons extracted from past research on the weed control problem and a survey of a vast body of pertinent literature led to the specification of key requirements to be met by a suitable optimization framework. The proposed layered control structure¡ªincluding planning, coordination, and execution layers¡ªrelies on a set of nested optimization processes of which an ¡°infinite horizon¡± Model Predictive Control scheme plays a key role in planning and coordination. Some challenges and recent results on the Pontryagin Maximum Principle for infinite horizon optimal control are also discussed. 1. Introduction This paper concerns a framework based on dynamic optimization and, in particular, optimal control to support the management and control of resources in a wide range of problems arising in agriculture. The relevance of optimizing resources in agriculture is undeniable. In fact, the need to feed a growing population on earth while keeping a sustainable equilibrium with the environment is one of the most critical challenges that humankind is facing [1, 2]. Being a fact that this general issue concerns the general problem of food production resources and of global resources management of the earth, and thus, transcends the strict context of agriculture [1¨C6], it is absolutely clear that the scarcity of resources and the multiple, mostly adverse, impacts in the environment call for advanced management practices in which optimization should be increasingly pervasive and effective [7, 8]. It is not surprising that the research community has been enthusiastically embracing the huge challenges arising in the extremely wide range of research and management problems arising in this context, as it is attested by a vast amount of technical literature. These challenges span the whole spectrum of relevant issues: from the optimization problem formulation¡ªencompassing the specification of the scope of the interactions to be considered, the modeling of system's dynamics, the problem constraints and performance criteria, and the optimization time horizon¡ªto the approaches to solve it¡ªwhich may draw from optimization and control theory results, notably the characterization of solutions to their approximation, analysis of sensitivity and robustness of the solution, and the numerical issues arising in the computation procedures¡ª, and to the framework to integrate the generated output in appropriate decision-making and control support
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cpis/2013/769598/