GARCÍA ALONSO, CARLOS, AMADOR HIDALGO, FRANCISCO
No
Acta Hortic.
Conference Paper
Científica
0.244
01/01/2001
000175044200010
2-s2.0-2942547617
In agriculture enterprises, the cost structure of crops and livestock is very variable over time due to uncontrollable factors such as weather, fuel costs, labour availability, and so on. This variability is especially important in horticulture crops and fruits, but differs between production systems that have different levels of environmental control, for example, protected and non-protected crops, or irrigated and dry farming. Under uncertain environments farmers need easy tools to support their project design and financial decisions. To achieve this we designed and developed easy to use software, called PRAPPIS (Project Appraisal Information System), for project appraisal under risky and uncertain environments based on Monte Carlo simulation techniques and multicriteria analysis. In this paper we show the logical model of the whole system (Fig. 1) and the preliminary results of financial project appraisal for horticultural investments using different statistical distributions and cost structures. Users must have always a previous knowledge of the horticultural business before chose the statistical distributions (certainty -none-, risky or uncertain environments) of financial parameters as the results can be sensitive to the choice of distribution. Our Monte Carlo algorithm offers any standard and non-standard statistical distributions in order to represent many different financial situations. Results are presented in a standard data format or graphically. The PRAPPIS software structure runs very quickly on a PC-based environment.
Economic efficiency; Financial decisions; Operations research; Project design; Software model