Toft : Model Based Decision Support in Sow Herds 55 Model Based Decision Support in Sow Herds with Emphasis on Linking Decisions with Diierent Time Horizons

Herd management is essentially decision making under uncertainty. The manager makes decisions without speciic knowledge of the future (and present) state of the system. Decisions made on the tactical level are generally more uncertain than the ones on the operational level. However, a tactical decision will have an innuence on the decisions made on the operational level through the timehorizon of the tactical decision. Furthermore, if the system develops in an unexpected way, then the only way to adapt to the new situation will be through decisions on the operational level. Decisions made on the operational level should therefore be optimal with respect to both the current state of the system and the tactical decisions made. As a result, a tactical decision is only optimal if it's conditional on a optimal strategy identiied on the operational level. The object of this project is to implement a model to handle these multi-level decision making problems with varying time horizons. The main object is to develop methods in a more general framework. Speciic plans include automatic processing of registrations using bayesian methods to collect information on animal and herd level.