Harvest Scheduling Subject to Maximum Area Restrictions: Exploring Exact Approaches

We consider a spatial problem arising in forest harvesting. For environmental reasons, blocks harvested should not exceed a certain total area, typically 40 hectares. Traditionally, this problem, called the adjacency problem has been solved by forming a priori blocks from basic cells of 5 to 20 hectares and solving the resulting mixed integer program. Better solutions can be obtained by including the construction of blocks in the decision process. This problem is far more complex combinatorially, and so far only heuristic methods have been applied to solve large problems. We present an exact algorithmic approach that has yielded good results in computational tests. The approach is based on determining a strong formulation of the linear programming problem through a clique representation of a projected problem. ∗ Partial funding for this research was received from FONDECYT under grant number ??. Research support the second author was provided by the National Science Foundation (Geography and Regional Science Program and the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program) under grant BCS-0114362 The authors would like to thank Klaus Barber of the USDA Forest Service for making the utilized forests available for analysis.