Review of combinatorial problems induced by spatial forest harvesting planning

Abstract

In the last two decades forest planning and management has become very much focused on spatially oriented decisions, due to the introduction of spatial details, such as road building, and environmental concerns, like wildlife protection, biodiversity, reducing erosion and improving water quality. This has led to modeling transformations and extensions in planning forest activities, as mixed integer decision variables are necessary to account for spatial restrictions. These new models are much harder to solve due to the added combinatorial complexity. In this paper, we discuss issues of modeling spatial criteria, as well as algorithms that have been developed to solve them, both heuristic and exact. We present these results as they have evolved in a state-of-the-art structure.