Lars Relund Nielsen

Sune one of my PhD students has just finished his defense of his thesis titled “Discrete Location Problems – Theory, Algorithms, and Extensions to Multiple Objectives“. I would like to congratulate Sune with his PhD title and for a good presentation at the defense. I have included the thesis summary below. Summary This PhD–dissertation proposes a number of solution procedures for discrete facility location problems. In the literature of operations research, location problems are mathematical models describing optimization problems where one or more facilities need to be placed in relation to a given set of customers or demand points. An example is the location of hospitals which needs to be performed in such a way as to take into account capacity limits and the sizes of nearby towns and cities.

Reza one of my PhD students has just finished his defense of his thesis titled “Optimization Methods in a Stochastic Production Environment“. I would like to congratulate Reza with his PhD title and for a good presentation at the defense. I have included the thesis summary below. Summary This dissertation with an interdisciplinary approach applies techniques from Operations Research and Statistics in order to develop models that support decisions regarding feeding and marketing of growing/finishing pigs. Stochastic dynamic programming is used as the main optimization tool to model decisions, and state space models are used as the primary statistical technique to describe the stochastic nature of the system. Based on data streams from online farm sensors and market prices, the state space model transforms data into information which is embedded into the decision models using Bayesian updating.

The research paper “A hierarchical Markov decision process modeling feeding and marketing decisions of growing pigs” have been published in European Journal of Operational Research. Abstract: Feeding is the most important cost in the production of growing pigs and has a direct impact on the marketing decisions, growth and the final quality of the meat. In this paper, we address the sequential decision problem of when to change the feed-mix within a finisher pig pen and when to pick pigs for marketing. We formulate a hierarchical Markov decision process with three levels representing the decision process. The model considers decisions related to feeding and marketing and finds the optimal decision given the current state of the pen. The state of the system is based on information from on-line repeated measurements of pig weights and feeding and is updated using a Bayesian approach. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the features […]

The research paper “Markov decision processes to model livestock systems” have been published as a chapter in Handbook of Operations Research in Agriculture and the Agri-Food Industry. The paper gives a review of the increasing amount of papers using MDPs to model livestock farming systems and provide an overview over the recent advances within this branch of research. Moreover, theory and algorithms for solving both ordinary and hierarchical MDPs are given and possible software for solving MDPs are considered.