Development of an appropriate resource information system to support agricultural management at farm enterprise level : a prototype design for a decision support system in Moghan Agro-industrial Complex, Iran

This thesis describes development of and experimentation with a prototype of an appropriate resource information system that improves decision making processes in farm management The system includes a geographic information system with a powerful process model that forms a decision support system for land use planning, monitoring and evaluation at farm enterprise level. The land use planning sub-system uses a new concept and supports planning at tactical and operational levels. It consists of a crop growth simulation model that accurately estimates the productivity of each feasible land use, a linear programming model that integrates the physical and socioeconomic information and designs the best suitable plan that maximizes the profit of the system under a given set of constraints (tactical plan), ad a spatial decision model that translates the tactical plan into an actual operational plan. The system illustrates the importance of process models in the integration of information from various disciplines and sources into management decisions, and the application of geographic information systems in support of multiple objective decision problems.