A MILP Decision Support Approach for the Optimal Forest Planning Management

NOVAS, J. MATIAS; FRANK CECILIO, PIEDRA JIMENEZ; RODRIGUEZ, MARIA ANALIA; BROZ, DIEGO

Conferencia; International Conference of Production Research-Americas (ICPR-Americas) 2022; 2022

A decision support system for the forest planning management defines all the sequence of activities, as a combination of silviculture treatments, that each forest land area will receive through the whole planning horizon, as well as when these activities will be required to be performed. There are different possible combinations of activities, which also depend on the type of trees. Also, the yield and operational costs depend on the tree species, age, previous received treatments, etc. In this approach, a general mathematical programming framework for the optimal forest planning problem is proposed. The Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model determines the optimal forest management alternative (combination of silvicultural treatments) sequence for each stand, and their timber assortment production. The proposed model was validated using real data from a forest company located in the province of Misiones, Argentina. The test cases were solved using CPLEX solver and, as a growth simulator, the SisPinus software was employed. The computational results show that the developed framework can be used as a decision-making tool for this complex problem, which provides alternative solutions with different trade-offs among the considered criteria.