Sustainability is becoming more and more important in our daily lives. The growing population and industry are increasingly pressuring our planet’s limited resources. As a supplier to the agro-food industry, Adifo wants to help solve this problem by adding the sustainability coefficient as a factor in its recipe management tool.
Sustainability is a very general term. Adifo is working together with partners to give all stakeholders from our industry more insight in what sustainability really means. Until now, the carbon footprint was the primary focus, but further research has shown that other factors such as eutrofication, water usage, land usage, acidification, climate change and others should also be considered when looking at sustainability. Depending on the case, one component could be more dominant than the other.
With this internship we want to give the advisor of the feed company and the farmer tools to take sustainability into consideration while preparing the optimal feeding program for animals. Here we focus on the business case of a pig farmer. The purpose is to grow these pigs as fast and efficiently as possible to get them to the wanted weight and move them to the slaughterhouse. To support this process, the pigs are fed with different feeds throughout their growth cycle, each feed designed specifically for the specific growth stage of the pig. BESTMIX®, a recipe management and optimalization tool developed by Adifo, allows feed advisors and nutritionists to design recipes for the feed and food industry. By setting up constraints on the recipes (such as ingredient constraints, nutritional constraints and production constraints), the software will use a linear solver (lpsolve) to determine the recipe that fulfills all constraints at the lowest cost possible. The cost aspect is the only factor considered in the optimization today.
As first part of the assignment, the student will investigate how to integrate the different sustainability factors into the optimization result of the feeding program, in such a way that not only cost is the primary targeted function for the optimization. In other words, the student will implement multi factor optimization. Our users should have the option to take for example carbon footprint or the global sustainability as a factor in the result. This outcome will no longer be the cheapest solution for the feeding program. Moreover, the farmer and feed company will gain insights in the possible on the cost for alternative feed programs that are more sustainable.
The second part of the assignment is to take into account uncertainty of the quality of the ingredients used. In practice, Adifo knows the constraints on the type of ingredients and nutrients used, as well as the price. However, the quality is uncertain at a given moment in time. The student will investigate how to handle this uncertainty during the optimalization process.