Giant? The Potentials and the Pitfalls1 In 2009 the World Bank published a report entitled Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant: Prospects for Commercial Agriculture in the Guinea Savannah Zone and Beyond. The report highlights the agricultural potential of Africa’s Guinea Savannah (henceforth GS) zone, which it describes as “one of the largest underused agricultural land reserves in the world” (p...

In agricultural harvesting processes, the infield logistics of transporting the crop from the harvesters' tanks to a street transporter at the field border with an unloading vehicle is challenging. The harvesters have to be unloaded while driving and in time to prevent the loss of expensive process time. The path planning for the unloading vehicle has to consider the unharvested area as a dynam...

Faced with planning mass relief campaigns in liberated Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration relied heavily on cheap supplies of skimmed milk from surplus production in northern Europe. The success of this approach swept aside more detailed planning around restoring national maternal and children's health services. This reli...

The Web is a huge repository of geospatial information. Efficient retrieval of this information is a key factor in planning and decision-making in many domains, including agriculture. However, standards for data annotation and exchange enable only syntactic interoperability, while semantic heterogeneity presents challenges. This work describes a framework that tackles interoperability problems ...

Decision support systems are generally geared to short-term tactical decision makkrg. As an alternative, this paper develops a mathematical progrming model to evaluate long-term strategic alternatives in the context of farm-level agricultural production where a broiler farm considers long-term implications of diversification into commercial aquiculture. The model considers a ten-year strategic ...

Abstract In recent years, operations research in agriculture has improved the harvested yield, reduced cost and time required for field operations, maintained economic environmental sustainability. The heuristics method, named Evolutionary neighborhood discovery algorithm (ENDA), is applied to minimize inter-field intra-field distance of routing planning machines multiple agricultural fields. p...

The study concerns the formation of human capital determined by level education, quality higher and secondary special education. Changes in social, economic, technological, information fields require territorial organization educational objects, namely, clusters various profiles. purpose is to develop concept city planning cluster Kazan urban agglomeration, determine its specifics profile, taki...