Imposing Connectivity Constraints in Forest Planning Models

Rodolfo Carvajal (), Miguel Constantino (), Marcos Goycoolea (), Juan Pablo Vielma () and Andrés Weintraub ()
Additional contact information
Rodolfo Carvajal: H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332; and Escuela de Negocios, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile
Miguel Constantino: Centro de Investigação Operacional, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal
Marcos Goycoolea: Escuela de Negocios, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile
Juan Pablo Vielma: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139; and Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260
Andrés Weintraub: Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile; and Instituto Milenio Sistemas Complejos de Ingeniería, Santiago, Chile

Operations Research, 2013, vol. 61, issue 4, 824-836

Abstract: Connectivity requirements are a common component of forest planning models, with important examples arising in wildlife habitat protection. In harvest scheduling models, one way of addressing preservation concerns consists of requiring that large contiguous patches of mature forest are maintained. In the context of nature reserve design, it is common practice to select a connected region of forest, as a reserve, in such a way as to maximize the number of species and habitats protected. Although a number of integer programming formulations have been proposed for these forest planning problems, most are impractical in that they fail to solve reasonably sized scheduling instances. We present a new integer programming methodology and test an implementation of it on five medium-sized forest instances publicly available in the Forest Management Optimization Site repository. Our approach allows us to obtain near-optimal solutions for multiple time-period instances in fewer than four hours.

Keywords: integer programming; cutting plane; natural resources (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.2013.1183 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:61:y:2013:i:4:p:824-836

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().