A Stochastic Programming Model for Optimizing the Production of Farmed Atlantic Salmon

We present a multi-stage stochastic programming formulation for the long-term production planning problem of a salmon farmer. Uncertainty in prices, growth and mortality is included in the model formulation, but we mainly focus on modeling the growth and development of the biomass in this paper. The planning horizon is 4–5 years, spanning approximately 3 life cycles of releasing smolt and slaughtering salmon. The objective is to maximize the expected profits from farming salmon, with the main decisions being both the timing and the quantity of releasing smolt and selling salmon. This chapter focuses on the description of the stochastic model and important factors for the modelling. Further work will focus more on computations and analysis.