Agricultural Planning Models for Stavropol Region: Mathematical Description and Simulation Strategies

Finding optimal sustainable production strategies that account for the environmental consequences of production can be cast as an optimal control or a dynamic programming analytical problem. The high dimensionality and nonlinear nature of the processes involved make such formulations impracticable, so simplifications are necessary. Each simplification compromises some optimality, so the choice of a particular approach depends on the specific problem and on the computational resources and tastes of the user. This chapter outlines a number of procedures for tackling the problem based on alternative assumptions and compromises.