A MIXED INTEGER MATHEMATICAL MODELLING FRAMEWORK FOR INVESTIGATING APPROACHES TO STRATEGIC FOREST NETWORK CAPACITY DESIGN

Abstract

Different elements in the forest industry, such as available forest resources, manufacturing plants and mills, and potential customers constitute links in a value chain. Strategic forest network design deals with optimizing the potential performance of this chain. In the forestry network, although some of the decisions are made independently they may have high impact on each other. These consist of forest management, capacity expansion, and network flow problem. Considering forest management and the network design problems including capacity expansion, we can address two approaches to deal with them. The first approach, which is the current approach in Canada, is the separate approach in which the forest management is done as a separate decision making process. In the second approach, which is an integrated approach, the forest management problem is considered as a part of the network design problem and in a single decision making process. The goal of the present research is to investigate these two decision making approaches, using mathematical models and laboratory data sets.