An historical perspective on the development of forest planning models with emphasis on operational level

Abstract

The application of operations research techniques has led to a substantial improvement in the economic and ecologic efficiency of forest management, both for planted and natural forests. Forest planning addresses problems in different hierarchical levels that involve specific planning horizons and formulation complexity. This study proposes an historical perspective on the development of forest planning models in the last five decades, with a focus on the operational level. The emergence of operations research applied to forest planning problems can be dated back to the 60’s, with an intensification of this line of research on the 80’s and 90’s, accompanying the fast development on the available computing power. In the 90’s, forest planning problems started to be classified according to hierarchical levels in strategic, tactical and operational. While the strategic and tactical levels address decisions on the long- and medium-term, the operational level deals with short-term decisions, typically involving harvesting machinery allocation and transportation of forest products. In this sense, the operational planning is characterized by a high level of complexity of the planning models and economic importance to forest management. We conclude that despite the increasing number of publications related to forest planning, the operational level remains underrepresented and efforts to integrate decisions across the different hierarchical levels of forest planning are required.