The mathematical formulation and scheduling for creating a self sustainable vegetable food garden

Abstract

The idea of this project is to optimize the operations of a community vegetable garden to produce enough food for a certain amount of people as well as achieve financial self sustainability. The project looks at the operations of a community vegetable garden that is currently subsidised by a corporate partner and aims to optimise the resource usage, scheduling and operations to make it possible for the food garden to become self sustainable. A mathematical model was created in order to find an optimal solution for the problem. The area of soil given needs to produce the maximum amount of nutrients possible in order to make the vegetable garden self sustainable. Linear programming were used to determine the amount and types of vegetables to plant each month, in order to maximize profits, reach financial sustainability and have a balanced meal each day. Agriculture provide a few complexities, but could be addressed using Industrial Engineering skills such as Operations Research, Business Accounting and Engineering Economics.