Heuristic solution approaches to operational forest planning problems

Operational forest planning problems are typically very difficult problems to solve due to problem size and constraint structure. This paper presents three heuristic solution approaches to operational forest planning problems. The authors develop solution procedures based on Interchange, Simulated Annealing and Tabu search. These approaches represent new and unique solution strategies of this problem. Results are provided for applications to two actual forest planning problems and indicate that these approaches provide near optimal solutions in relatively short amounts of computer time.