MARKOVIAN MODEL OF FRUIT GROWTH

A CLAUSSE; F MAYORANO; A RUBIALES; V HERRERO

APPLIED ENGINEERING IN AGRICULTURE

AMER SOC AGRICULTURAL & BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERS

Lugar: St. Joseph, MI; Año: 2006 vol. 23 p. 105 - 110

0883-8542

A computer model for the assessment of fruit growth, based on Markov chains, is presented in this article. Themodel is aimed to support commercial and logistic decisions in fruit productions, providing forecasting of the size distributionat harvest, given the regional current climatic parameters. The model applies historical correlations between the fruit growth and temperatures, and requires the construction of a specific database. A corresponding methodology and software support for the fruit-size database was also developed with the model. The forecasting performance was validated against experimental data of Granny Smith apples in the Rio Negro Valley (Argentina).