Sustainable vegetable crop supply problem with perishable stocks

In this paper, we deal with a vegetable crop supply problem with two main particularities: (i) the production must respect certain ecologically-based constraints and (ii) harvested crops can be stocked but only for a limited period of time, given that they are perishable. To model these characteristics, we develop a linear formulation in which each variable is associated to a crop rotation plan. This model contains a very large number of variables and is therefore solved with the aid of a column generation approach. Moreover, we also propose a two-stage stochastic programming with recourse model which takes into consideration that information on the demands might be uncertain. We provide a discussion of the results obtained via computational tests run on instances adapted from real-world data.