Bucking Decisions Anticipation

We consider a two-echelon timber supply chain in which the first echelon consists of several stands to be harvested and the second echelon consists of mills to be procured with logs of different length. This problem aims at minimizing harvesting and transportation costs for one production period, while satisfying demand expressed as mix of volumes of specific log types. Harvesting cost, which includes felling, bucking and hauling to roadside, depends upon the number of log type to be produced and sorted. Each stands to be harvested are modeled individually with a limited number of trees of various classes of diameter and total length, which affects the productivity factors of the bucking patterns to be used. To take these characteristics into account, we propose heuristics based on columns generation to solve the supply network problem at the forest level with an anticipation of bucking operations at the stand level.