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Imposing Connectivity Constraints in Forest Planning Models

Rodolfo Carvajal¹; Miguel Constantino²; Marcos Goycoolea³; Juan Pablo Vielma⁴; Andres Weintraub⁵

¹ H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332; and Escuela de Negocios, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile · ² Centro de Investigação Operacional, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal · ³ Escuela de Negocios, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile · ⁴ Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139; and Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260 · ⁵ Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile; and Instituto Milenio Sistemas Complejos de Ingeniería, Santiago, Chile

Connectivity requirements are a common component of forest planning models, with important examples arising in wildlife habitat protection. In harvest scheduling models, one way of addressing preservation concerns consists of requiring that large contiguous patches of mature forest are maintained. In the context of nature reserve design, it is common practice to select a connected region of forest, as a reserve, in such a way as to maximize the number of species and habitats protected. Although a number of integer programming formulations have been proposed for these forest planning problems, most are impractical in that they fail to solve reasonably sized scheduling instances. We present a new integer programming methodology and test an implementation of it on five medium-sized forest instances publicly available in the Forest Management Optimization Site repository. Our approach allows us to obtain near-optimal solutions for multiple time-period instances in fewer than four hours.

DOI

10.1287/opre.2013.1183

Volume

61 (4)

Pages

824-836

Language

en

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