Spatially explicit forest harvest scheduling with difference equations

Rachel St. John () and Sándor Tóth

Annals of Operations Research, 2015, vol. 232, issue 1, 235-257

Abstract: Spatially explicit harvest scheduling models optimize the layout of harvest treatments to best meet management objectives such as revenue maximization subject to a variety of economic and environmental constraints. A few exceptions aside, the mixed-integer programming core of every exact model in the literature requires one decision variable for every applicable prescription for a management unit. The only alternative to this “brute-force” method has been a network approach that tracks the management pathways of each unit over time via four sets of binary variables. Named after their linear programming-based aspatial predecessors, Models I and II, along with Model III, which has no spatial implementation, each of these models rely on static volume and revenue coefficients that must be calculated pre-optimization. We propose a fundamentally different approach that defines stand volumes and revenues as variables and uses difference equations and Boolean algebra to transition forest units from one planning period to the next. We show via three sets of computational experiments that the new model is a computationally promising alternative to Models I and II. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Forestry; Harvest scheduling; Integer programming; Spatial optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10479-012-1301-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:annopr:v:232:y:2015:i:1:p:235-257:10.1007/s10479-012-1301-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-012-1301-4

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().