Integration of Constraint Reasoning, and Simulation models in Forest Harvest Scheduling

Forest harvest planning and scheduling problem is an important part of forest resource management. It is a complex task requiring expertise and integration of multidisciplinary elds. We review mathematical programming as applied to forest harvesting problem. The review suggests that long term scheduling is diicult because of the prohibitive size of the model. Such long term scheduling allows one to see if sustainable forestry is actually being practiced. Thus, this method alone is not suucient for sustainable forest harvesting. In this paper we propose how constraint reasoning techniques from Artiicial Intelligence may be used along with simulation modelling to solve forest harvesting problem eeectively. We show how these techniques can be used to better model forest harvest plans and describe our work in progress towards building better forest harvest scheduling system.