مدیریت زمان واقعی اختلالات حمل و نقل در جنگلداری Real-time management of transportation disruptions in forestry

1. Introduction Optimization models and operations research (OR) methods have been used in the forest industry since the 1960s [1]. Recent reviews on how these models and methods are used to solve planning problems in forestry can be found in [2] (2015) and [3] (2014). These planning problems cover a wide range of activities such as sylviculture, harvesting, road building, production and transportation, which present to this day several challenges to OR practitioners [2, 4], as the forest industry attempts to improve its competitiveness and reduce its environmental impact. In particular, improving transportation planning in forestry has been the object of recent research of highly practical relevance, since transportation costs are estimated at more than one-third of wood procurement costs [2]. Minimizing transportation costs therefore represents a key element to improve the competitiveness of forest companies. Recently, a number of OR models and methods have been developed to solve the log-truck scheduling problem (LTSP) [5, 6, 7, 8, 9], which consists in deriving schedules for trucks to transport different wood products between forest sites and wood mills. In addition, several decision support systems, such as the ASICAM project in Chile [9] and the EPO project in Finland [10], were developed to ease transportation planning. A review of transportation planning systems in the forest industry and the contribution of OR in their development can be found in [11]. Note that few decision support systems are available to forest companies (compared to other industrial sectors [12]), as many forest companies still rely on experienced dispatchers to manually derive their transportation plans.