The optimal felling rate in the palm oil plantation system

Abstract

Successful oil palm plantation should have high profit, clean and environmental friendly. Since oil palm trees have a long life and it takes years to be fully grown, controlling the felling rate of the oil palm trees is a fundamental challenge. It needs to be addressed in order to maximize oil production. However, a good arrangement of the felling of the oil palm trees may also affect the amount of carbon absorption. The objective of this study is to develop an optimal felling model of the oil palm plantation system taking into account both oil production and carbon absorption. The model facilitates in providing the optimal control of felling rate that results in maximizing both oil production and carbon absorption. With this aim, the model is formulated considering oil palm biomass, carbon absorption rate, oil production rate and the average prices of carbon and oil palm. A set of real data is used to estimate the parameters of the model and numerical simulation is conducted to highlight the application of the proposed model. The resulting parameter estimation that leads to an optimal control of felling rate problem is solved.