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A System for the Design of Short Term Harvesting Strategy by R. Epstein; E. Nieto; A. Weintraub; P. Chevalier; J. Gabarró is a Engineering article available to read on EtoBox.

What is A System for the Design of Short Term Harvesting Strategy about?

Short term harvesting requires decisions on which stands to harvest, what timber volume to cut, what bucking patterns (how to cut up the logs) to apply to logs in order to obtain products that satisfy demand and which harvesting machinery to use. This is an important problem in forest management and dicult to solve well in satisfying demand, while maximizing net pro®ts. Traditionally, foresters have used manual approaches to ®nd adequate solutions, which has shortcomings both in time spent by analysts and the quality of solutions. Since demand for timber products is de®ned by length, diameter and quality of each piece, this leads to a complex combinatorial problem in matching supply (standing trees) and demand. We developed one of the few reported approaches for solving the short term harvesting problem based on a computerized system, using a linear programming approach. Determining adequate bucking patterns is not trivial. We develop a column generation approach to generate such patterns. The subproblem is a specially designed branch and bound scheme. The generation of bucking patterns implemented within the LP formulation led to a signi®cant improvement of solutions. We believe t

Who reads A System for the Design of Short Term Harvesting Strategy?

Author

R. Epstein; E. Nieto; A. Weintraub; P. Chevalier; J. Gabarró

Publisher

Elsevier Science; Elsevier ; Elsevier BV (ISSN 0377-2217)

Published

1999

Language

EN

Field

Engineering (Physical Sciences)