A production capacity investment decision-making tool for the indoor vertical farming industry

• DOI: 10.1016/j.atech.2023.100244
• Publication Date: 2023-05-05T06:55:41Z
• Authors: Ben Schulman; John T. Blake; Richard Donald
• Keywords: Investment; Investment Decisions; Capital investment

Indoor vertical farming (VF) systems are a form of controlled environment agriculture, making use technology to improve food availability and security while reducing environmental impacts. Commercially, it is young industry with potential disrupt the supply chain status quo but faced uncertainty risk respect product demand production efficacy. As result, VF firms must make decisions develop capacity that meets market ensuring long-term profitability. This research presents method for facilitate allocation capital resources new considering uncertainty. The makes two mixed integer linear programming models, executed sequentially, identify plan then plans under range different scenarios. Profit used evaluate performance includes multi-criteria comparison how perform using preselected criteria.