Forestry planning

Abstract

Since forestry is one the main activities of the country, the development of eficient forestry planning processes appears as a significative improvement in its global competitiveness. Forestry planning is a major challenge since it involves the solution of complex logistics problems most of them of combinatorial nature. Beginning with the road definition problems, followed by harvesting issues, such as machinery location and machine eficiency problems, yield-growth prediction and bucketing problems and ending with the set of transportation problems, most of them normally requires huge integer-based decision formulations and/or are related to mathematical formulations hard to solve. Since some of these problems have not been studied in deep under high-level of scale economics, we assume the challenge of solve two of them with real-life operational data. Based on the long-term national estimation of the potential forestry load for railroad-based transportation systems, we define an optimal forestry transportation matrix. It is also very important to study the optimization of steep terrain forestry operations, which are executed with cable logging systems. The maximization of cable yarding log payload is a relevant factor to improve forestry productivity levels and achieve competitive costs.