Fuzzy multiple objective programming techniques in modeling forest planning

In many cases it is under legislative mandate to manage publicly owned forest resources for multiple uses (i.e., timber production, hunting, grazing). Forest resources have some particular characteristics which make rather difficult their management. In fact they are a typical example of a joint production (market and social goods) and therefore every management policy must face tradeoffs between forest use and forest preservation. In [6] Steuer and Schuler presented a case study of an attempt to apply multiple objective linear programming techniques in management of the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri. More often than not, accurate market values are not available for some forest products (e.g. dispersed recreation) and, therefore, instead of exact coefficients we have to deal with their approximations (fuzzy numbers) in the modeling phase. In this paper we demonstrate the applicability of fuzzy multiple objective programming techniques for resource allocation problems in forest planning.