The purpose of this research is to develop an optimizing system for a distribution of agricultural products at the wholesale markets using fully-connected neural networks. It is well-known that Boltzmann Machine, which is a specialized type of fully-connected neural networks, can obtain acceptable solutions for NP complete problem, which has no mathematical method for solution. However, this method is available only for selection of problem, selecting an optimal path, and it is not available to determinate analogue data such as quantity of distribution. We, therefore, improved the algorithm of Boltzmann Machine and developed an optimizing system for distribution. This new method enable us to obtain an optimal quantity of distribution which provides high sum of sales and low risk under fixed condition. A change of quantity of agricultural products from a brand product areas, however, influences the prices at the wholesale markets. We further improved the system. After the quantity of distribution was determined, we estimated a change of prices at the wholesale markets. Then, we put the estimated results back to the system and reconsidered the quantities of distribution. Backpropagation neural networks were used for price estimation. This improved system provided more practical solution for distribution.

View full abstract

The function of the localized agricultural resources have two characteristics. One is agricultural productivity function, while the other is non-agricultural productivity function well-known as external effect. These external effect for localized agricultural resources appears as the level for residential environment. The main objective of this study is to make an economic analysis of agricultural resources in Kasama city, Ibaraki prefecture. Additionally it is aimed to confirme the relation between the agricultural external effect and agricultural land use. Simmilary it is aimed to make clear appearance process of external effect of agricultural resources on residential environment. The results of this analysis can be summarized as follows. 1) Through the estimation the hedonic price function of agricultural resources as environmental goods, the appearance of external effect as amenity is different in agricultural land use according to estimated land price level. 2) Based on Canonical Discriminant Functions and Fisher's Linear Discriminant Functions, it has been confirmed that agricultural land use is different from estimated land price level. 3) From the result of Correspondence Analysis, it is confirmed that the agricultural land is utilized by the level of net return of land for culutiveted crops according to estimated land price level.

View full abstract

Since many plant diseases have been investigated by many plant pathologists in Japan, a lot of available data for those pathogens, routes of infection, methods of protection, etc. are accumulated for the research results of plant diseases. Then, it is necessary to accumulate and file those data systematically to develop the database system for diagnosis of plant diseases, identification of causal pathogens and plant diseases protection. Twenty three kinds of major crops, i.e., rice, barley, wheat, tomato and so on, were selected as the target for the database. The data of 807 kinds of bacterial, fungal and viral diseases of these crops were also collected. Informix, the commercial database management system, and Wingz, the commercial spreadsheets software, were adopted to develop the database system and user interface. Each software was provided by ASCII Co. Ltd. in Japan. Informix-SQL and Informix-ESQL/C were used to describe the database. The database has the following functions: a) To retrieve the disease name, symptoms of disease, methods of protection and route of infection by using host name, pathogen name or keywords. b) To retrieve the disease name, symptoms of disease, methods of protection and route of infection by using characteristic data of pathogen. c) To refer the photographs of plant diseases.

View full abstract