An Application of Facilities Location Theory to the Design of Forest Harvesting Areas

Abstract

The problem of designing forest harvesting units and assigning logging equipment to those units can be formulated as a facilities location problem which exhibits a unique structure that has not previously appeared in the literature. This structure is referred to here as a “cascading fixed charge” structure; for small problems, exact solutions can be obtained by means of 0–1 integer programming systems. Problems of practical size for use in forest planning, however, would involve thousands of 0–1 variables and constraints. Such problems are intractable for presently available integer programming codes. This paper presents an approximation algorithm which has been developed to solve facilities location problems exhibiting the special cascading fixed charge structure. Experience with an application of the algorithm to an actual forest planning area is cited.

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