Transparency in the Pork Supply Chain: Comparing China and The Netherlands

We present a research plan to assess the value of transparency by comparing pork supply chains in The Netherlands and China.We assume that chain performance depends on chain configuration, which depends on societal context and its associated quality control institutions. We define chain configuration in terms of structure and transparency. In order to be able to assess the influence of societal context and its quality control institutions on chain configuration and performance, we compare two countries that have very different societies. Ultimately, our goal is to be able to indicate whether a certain chain configuration suits all, or whether chain configuration should be tailored to societal context.Pork supply chain, societal context, transparency, information exchange, chain configuration, Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,

Modelling the use of different enforcement strategies to improve food safety

According to the General Food Law, food producers are responsible for the production of safe products. Safe in this regard is often interpreted as compliance to EU food safety legislation. The level of compliance between companies differs and can be improved by measures such as education or sanctions. In order to determine the effectiveness of various enforcement strategies on the level of compliance we developed a simulation tool using Agent Based Modelling (ABM) as a method

Machine learning for regional crop yield forecasting in Europe

Crop yield forecasting at national level relies on predictors aggregated from smaller spatial units to larger ones according to harvested crop areas. Such crop areas come from land cover maps or reported statistics, both of which can have errors and uncertainties. Sub-national or regional crop yield forecasting minimizes the propagation of these errors to some extent. In addition, regional forecasts provide added value and insights to stakeholders on regional differences within a country, which would otherwise compensate each other at national level. We propose a crop yield forecasting approach for multiple spatial levels based on regional crop yield forecasts from machine learning. Machine learning, with its data-driven approach, can leverage larger data sizes and capture nonlinear relationships between predictors and yield at regional level. We designed a generic machine learning workflow to demonstrate the benefits of regional crop yield forecasting in Europe. To evaluate the quality and usefulness of regional forecasts, we predicted crop yields for 35 case studies, including nine countries that are major producers of six crops (soft wheat, spring barley, sunflower, grain maize, sugar beets and potatoes). Machine learning models at regional level had lower normalized root mean squared errors (NRMSE) and uncertainty than a linear trend model, with Wilcoxon p-values of 3e-7 and 2e-7 for 60 days before harvest and end of season respectively. Similarly, regional machine learning forecasts aggregated to national level had lower NRMSEs than forecasts from an operational system in 18 out of 35 cases 60 days before harvest, with a Wilcoxon p-value of 0.95 indicating similar performance. Our models have room for improvement, especially during extreme years. Nevertheless, regional crop yield forecasts from machine learning and aggregated national forecasts provide a consistent forecasting method across spatial levels and insights from regional differences to support important policy decisions

Transparency in the Pork Supply Chain: Comparing China and The Netherlands

We present a research plan to assess the value of transparency by comparing pork supply chains in The Netherlands and China.We assume that chain performance depends on chain configuration, which depends on societal context and its associated quality control institutions. We define chain configuration in terms of structure and transparency. In order to be able to assess the influence of societal context and its quality control institutions on chain configuration and performance, we compare two countries that have very different societies. Ultimately, our goal is to be able to indicate whether a certain chain configuration suits all, or whether chain configuration should be tailored to societal context

Modelling the use of different enforcement strategies to improve food safety

According to the General Food Law, food producers are responsible for the production of safe products. Safe in this regard is often interpreted as compliance to EU food safety legislation. The level of compliance between companies differs and can be improved by measures such as education or sanctions. In order to determine the effectiveness of various enforcement strategies on the level of compliance we developed a simulation tool using Agent Based Modelling (ABM) as a method.</p

Introducing digital twins to agriculture

Digital twins are being adopted by increasingly more industries, transforming them and bringing new opportunities. Digital twins provide previously unheard levels of control over physical entities and help to manage complex systems by integrating an array of technologies. Recently, agriculture has seen several technological advancements, but it is still unclear if this community is making an effort to adopt digital twins in its operations. In this work, we employ a mixed-method approach to investigate the added-value of digital twins for agriculture. We examine the extent of digital twin adoption in agriculture, shed light on the concept and the benefits it brings, and provide an application-based roadmap for a more extended adoption. We report a literature review of digital twins in agriculture, covering years 2017-2020. We identify 28 use cases, and compare them with use cases in other disciplines. We compare reported benefits, service categories, and technology readiness levels to assess the level of digital twin adoption in agriculture. We distill the digital twin characteristics that can provide added-value to agriculture from the examined digital twin applications in agriculture and in other disciplines. Then, inspired by digital twin applications in other disciplines, we propose a roadmap for digital twins in agriculture, consisting of examples of growing complexity. We conclude this paper by identifying the distinctive characteristics of agricultural digital twins.</p

Interpretability of deep learning models for crop yield forecasting

Machine learning models for crop yield forecasting often rely on expert-designed features or predictors. The effectiveness and interpretability of these handcrafted features depends on the expertise of the people designing them. Neural networks have the ability to learn features directly from input data and train the feature learning and prediction steps simultaneously. In this paper, we evaluate the performance and interpretability of neural network models for crop yield forecasting using data from the MARS Crop Yield Forecasting System of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. The selected neural networks can handle sequential or time series data and include long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network and 1-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN). Performance was compared with a linear trend model and a Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) model, trained using hand-designed features. Feature importance scores of input variables were computed using feature attribution methods and were analyzed by crop yield modeling and agronomy experts. Results showed that LSTM models perform statistically better than GBDT models for soft wheat in Germany and similar to GBDT models for all other case studies. In addition, LSTM models captured the effect of yield trend, static features (e.g. elevation, soil water holding capacity) and biomass features on crop yield well, but struggled to capture the impact of extreme temperature and moisture conditions. Our work shows the potential of deep learning to automatically learn features and produce reliable crop yield forecasts, and highlights the importance and challenges of involving human stakeholders in assessing model interpretability

Combining Telecom Data with Heterogeneous Data Sources for Traffic and Emission Assessments—An Agent-Based Approach

To create quality decision-making tools that would contribute to transport sustainability, we need to build models relying on accurate, timely, and sufficiently disaggregated data. In spite of today’s ubiquity of big data, practical applications are still limited and have not reached technology readiness. Among them, passively generated telecom data are promising for studying travel-pattern generation. The objective of this study is twofold. First, to demonstrate how telecom data can be fused with other data sources and used to feed up a traffic model. Second, to simulate traffic using an agent-based approach and assess the emission produced by the model’s scenario. Taking Novi Sad as a case study, we simulated the traffic composition at 1-s resolution using the GAMA platform and calculated its emission at 1-h resolution. We used telecom data together with population and GIS data to calculate spatial-temporal movement and imported it to the ABM. Traffic flow was calibrated and validated with data from automatic vehicle counters, while air quality data was used to validate emissions. The results demonstrate the value of using diverse data sets for the creation of decision-making tools. We believe that this study is a positive endeavor toward combining big data and ABM in urban studies