Operations Research Problems and Data Envelopment Analysis in Agricultural Land Processing – A Review

Abstract

Research Question: This paper aims at specifying the contribution of operations research (OR) methods and techniques to agricultural land processing. Motivation: Agricultural production is performed on an agricultural land, which has to be exploited in the best possible way, given the increasing human population and the limited availability of the land. Considering the importance of this issue, a large number of research studies dealing with problems in agriculture can be found in the literature, and many of these problems are solved by OR methods and techniques. However, to our knowledge, there are no review papers that deal with this specific area, so the main motivation is to provide a detailed review of selected OR methods application in the agricultural land processing area. Idea: The core idea behind this research is to perceive a real impact of OR methods and techniques implementation in the agricultural land processing. The research is based on detailed literature review for the period 2014-2019 and performed statistics involving publication by year, publication by journal and statistics involving keywords in articles. Data: The review was conducted using online repositories of the papers published in SCI and SCIe journals with impact factors in the period from 2014-2019. Tools: Analyzed papers are divided into three groups according to the OR method applied: linear optimization problems, DEA method and other OR methods (non linear, multicriteria, mixed integer programming, dynamic programming). Papers within the groups are analyzed according to the type of problems solved. Statistical analyses of all collected data were used to get a good insight into the applications of operations research problems and data envelopment analysis in agricultural land processing. Findings: The number of published papers in this specific area has a growing trend over the observed years (with some minor decrease in 2016 and 2019 in comparison with the previous year). All of the articles are related to specific application of the given methods to solving problems in the agricultural land processing, and this is the reason for many different keywords appearing in the articles. Some very important keywords such as “operations research” or “OR” does not appear in any article as a keyword. Inclusion of such common keywords may result in a faster search in repositories of all articles. Contribution: The primary contribution of this paper is a detailed review of application of linear optimization, data envelopment analysis and other OR methods in agricultural land processing in the period 2014-2019.