A Three-Stage Heuristic for Harvest Scheduling with Access Road Network Development

In this article we present a new model for the scheduling of forest harvesting with spatial and temporal constraints. Our approach is unique in that we incorporate access road network development into the harvest scheduling selection process. Due to the difficulty of solving the problem optimally, we develop a heuristic that consists of a solution construction stage and two solution improvement stages. We call our approach INROADS and compare it to three other approaches by employing hypothetical example problems with 225 stands (or cut blocks) over a three-period planning horizon. Thirteen example forests that vary in terms of stand value and spatial dispersion are used to evaluate our heuristic, which outperforms the other approaches tested. For. Sci: 46(2):204-218.

[1]  Andrés Weintraub,et al.  A heuristic process for solving large-scale, mixed-integer mathematical programming models for site-specific timber harvest and transportation planning , 1991 .

[2]  J. Nelson,et al.  The influence of cut-block size and adjacency rules on harvest levels and road networks , 1991 .

[3]  John Sessions,et al.  Preliminary Planning of Road Systems Using Digital Terrain Models , 1993 .

[4]  P. Gács,et al.  Algorithms , 1992 .

[5]  Charles ReVelle,et al.  The grid packing problem : selecting a harvesting pattern in an area with forbidden regions , 1996 .

[6]  Timothy P. McDonald,et al.  A new harvest operation cost model to evaluate forest harvest layout alternatives , 2000, Ann. Oper. Res..

[7]  C. Lockwood,et al.  Harvest scheduling with spatial constraints: a simulated annealing approach , 1993 .

[8]  Mark E. Ferguson,et al.  PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT , 2008 .

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

[10]  B. Bruce Bare,et al.  Spatially constrained timber harvest scheduling , 1989 .

[11]  M. S. Jamnick,et al.  An operational, spatially constrained harvest scheduling model , 1990 .

[12]  J. D. Brodie,et al.  Comparison of a random search algorithm and mixed integer programming for solving area-based forest plans. , 1990 .

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

[14]  Hanif D. Sherali,et al.  Estimating Optimal Thinning and Rotation for Mixed-Species Timber Stands Using a Random Search Algorithm , 1985 .

[15]  Alan T. Murray.  Spatial restrictions in harvest scheduling , 1999 .

[16]  John Sessions,et al.  Integrating Short-Term, Area-Based Logging Plans with Long-Term Harvest Schedules , 1991, Forest Science.

[17]  Karl R. Walters,et al.  Spatial and temporal allocation of stratum-based harvest schedules , 1993 .

[18]  Ola Sallnäs,et al.  Harvest scheduling under adjacency constraints — a case study from the Swedish sub‐alpine region , 1993 .

[19]  Richard L. Church,et al.  Heuristic solution approaches to operational forest planning problems , 1995 .

[20]  Karl-Heinz Hoffmann,et al.  Optimizing Simulated Annealing , 1990, PPSN.