Operations research methods for forest management and production planning

This work involves the application of operations research methods in forest management and in production planning. The forest management work involves an integrated series of activities ranging from long term strategic models to detailled single stand decision making. The production work is mostly focussed on manufacturing control. The common links between these apparently different areas are in three main themes. One is the hierarchical planning approach. Within this approach we have stressed optimization as means of exploring tradeoffs. We plan to develop advanced techniques that permit analysis of economic and ecological tradeoffs in forest management similar to the use of exchange curve methods that we are pursuing in manufacturing control. A second is the the use of integer programming methods to make discrete decisions. Successful use of integer programming requires strong formulations. We have created novel formulations in the areas of both forest harvesting under adjacency and in salmon aquaculture production planning. A third area is the use of surface fitting methods in estimation and control. This includes approximate dynamic programming approaches in stand level forest management and in economic lot sizing methods as well as the neural network methods that we use for manufacturing control and forest growth modelling.