A heuristic approach to automated forest road location

An optimization problem arising when planning forest harvesting operations is the location of new access roads. The new roads must cover several areas to be harvested at minimum cost. This problem is of economical and environmental relevance in the domain of forestry. In this study, the problem is expressed as a P-forest problem in a graph. It consists of determining a set of tree structures in a graph that covers a set of vertices corresponding to harvest areas. The objective is to minimize the sum of construction costs and harvesting costs. In addition to the location of roads, the P-forest problem has several relevant applications, including public transport, electricity transmission, roads, pipelines, and communication networks design. This paper presents a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) to solve this problem. The heuristic was implemented on a decision support system, and computational experiments were conducted on randomly generated and real instances to demonstrate the performa...

[1]  Pierre Hansen,et al.  Variable Neighborhood Search , 2018, Handbook of Heuristics.

[2]  M. Rönnqvist,et al.  An optimization model for annual harvest planning , 2004 .

[3]  Brian Boffey,et al.  Models for multi-path covering-routing problems , 1998, Ann. Oper. Res..

[4]  Günther R. Raidl,et al.  Variable Neighborhood Descent with Self-Adaptive Neighborhood-Ordering , 2006 .

[5]  W. Chung,et al.  Forest road network design using a trade-off analysis between skidding and road construction costs , 2008 .

[6]  Pedro Larrañaga,et al.  Mathematical modelling of UMDAc algorithm with tournament selection. Behaviour on linear and quadratic functions , 2002, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[7]  John Sessions,et al.  A Combinatorial Heuristic Approach for Solving Real-Size Machinery Location and Road Design Problems in Forestry Planning , 2006, Oper. Res..

[8]  J. Nelson,et al.  Projecting vector-based road networks with a shortest path algorithm , 2004 .

[9]  Alan T. Murray.  Route planning for harvest site access , 1998 .

[10]  Mikael Rönnqvist,et al.  Optimization in forestry , 2003, Math. Program..

[11]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  A Parallel Grasp for the Steiner Tree Problem in Graphs Using a Hybrid Local Search Strategy , 2000, J. Glob. Optim..

[12]  Timothy P. McDonald,et al.  A Three-Stage Heuristic for Harvest Scheduling with Access Road Network Development , 2000 .

[13]  F. Hwang,et al.  The Steiner Tree Problem , 2012 .

[14]  Vicki Aaronson Hutson,et al.  Indirect covering tree problems on spanning tree networks , 1993 .

[15]  Hans Rudolf Heinimann,et al.  Improved road network design models with the consideration of various link patterns and road design elements , 2007 .

[16]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures , 2003, Handbook of Metaheuristics.

[17]  Timothy J. Lowe,et al.  On the location of a tree-shaped facility , 1996, Networks.

[18]  Timothy J. Lowe,et al.  The generalized P-forest problem on a tree network , 1992, Networks.

[19]  Denis J. Dean,et al.  Finding optimal routes for networks of harvest site access roads using GIS-based techniques , 1997 .

[20]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  A tabu search approach for solving a difficult forest harvesting machine location problem , 2007, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[21]  Gilbert Laporte,et al.  Path, Tree and Cycle Location , 1998 .

[22]  Juan A. Mesa,et al.  A review of extensive facility location in networks , 1996 .

[23]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  Reactive GRASP: An Application to a Matrix Decomposition Problem in TDMA Traffic Assignment , 2000, INFORMS J. Comput..

[24]  Glen Murphy,et al.  Road and harvesting planning and operations , 2006 .

[25]  Thomas L. Magnanti,et al.  The multi-level network design problem , 1991 .

[26]  Alan T. Murray,et al.  Review of combinatorial problems induced by spatial forest harvesting planning , 2006, Discret. Appl. Math..