Forestry management under uncertainty

Abstract

The forest harvest and road construction planning problem consists fundamentally of managing land designated for timber production and divided into harvest cells. For each time period the planner must decide which cells to cut and what access roads to build in order to maximize expected net profit. We have previously developed deterministic mixed integer linear programming models for this problem. The main contribution of the present work is the introduction of a multistage Stochastic Integer Programming model. This enables the planner to make more robust decisions based on a range of timber price scenarios over time, maximizing the expected value instead of merely analyzing a single average scenario. We use a specialization of the Branch-and-Fix Coordination algorithmic approach. Different price and associated probability scenarios are considered, allowing us to compare expected profits when uncertainties are taken into account and when only average prices are used. The stochastic approach as formulated in this work generates solutions that were always feasible and better than the average solution, while the latter in many scenarios proved to be infeasible.