An enhanced radial interval programming approach for supporting agricultural production decisions under dual uncertainties and differential aspirations

An enhanced radial interval programming approach was developed for supporting the identification of sound agricultural production plans. It was designed to tackle dual uncertainties in both the economic and environmental subsystems as well as reflect differential aspiration levels for 'immunity' against such uncertainty. By adding protection functions to both the objective functions and constraints susceptible to dual uncertainties without any distributions, it improved upon previous methods through simultaneously measuring and manipulating expected return risk and resource-environmental compliance risk. Moreover, this study made novel attempts to explore system-wide optimal levels of robustness based on proposed performance evaluation criteria and investigations over the interactive effects of varied robustness aspirations for different model components. Based on analyzed tradeoffs among system optimality, robustness and uncertainty degree of solutions pertaining to the study case, a unified protection level of 13 (or 10) was recommended for risk-averse (or risk-neutral) decision making. The model outputs were compared to those from three alternatives, revealing that it could achieve a high level of system reliability at a minor price of economic return. This approach could be generalized for wide-scale applications.