A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach for the Sustainable Location of Urban Farms: Towards Farming 4.0

Abstract

Food security is a priority in sustainable development due to the growing population and continuous urbanization. As a result, the majority of the support and effort directed toward establishing sustainable agriculture has been directed toward the typical rural sector. A significant amount of research on sustainable agriculture in urban areas has been conducted. The concepts of digitalization and smart innovation have been widely adopted by the agricultural sector, which simplifies the integration of agriculture 4.0 into urban farming. This research investigates the sustainable location of urban farming in the context of agriculture 4.0, a three-step methodology for optimizing an urban location plan. The proposed architecture is founded on an optimization model, which optimizes the ecological benefit, the CO2 emissions, the transportation costs, the sensor costs, and the water consumption. The methodology first formulates the problem as a multi-objective optimization model, and then the proposed model is solved using weighting methods and the augmented epsilon constraint approach. Finally, a multi-criteria decision- making method (VIKOR) is used to compare the different solutions obtained.