An Optimal Control Framework for Resources Management in Agriculture

• Autor(a) principal: Lobo Pereira, Fernando
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Outros Autores: Fontes, Fernando ArmÉnio, Ferreira, Maria Margarida, Pinho, Maria Do RosÁrio, Oliveira, Vilma Alves, Costa, Eduardo, Silva, Geraldo Nunes [UNESP]
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Texto Completo: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cpis/2013/769598/; http://hdl.handle.net/11449/122656

An optimal control framework to support the management and control of resources in a wide range of problems arising in agriculture is discussed. Lessons extracted from past research on the weed control problem and a survey of a vast body of pertinent literature led to the specification of key requirements to be met by a suitable optimization framework. The proposed layered control structure—including planning, coordination, and execution layers—relies on a set of nested optimization processes of which an “infinite horizon” Model Predictive Control scheme plays a key role in planning and coordination. Some challenges and recent results on the Pontryagin Maximum Principle for infinite horizon optimal control are also discussed.