A three-stage heuristic for harvest scheduling with access road network development

In this article we present a new model for the scheduling of forest harvesting with spatial and temporal constraints. Our approach is unique in that we incorporate access road network development into the harvest scheduling selection process. Due to the difficulty of solving the problem optimally, we develop a heuristic that consists of a solution construction stage and two solution improvement stages. We call our approach INROADS and compare it to three other approaches by employing hypothetical example problems with 225 stands (or cut blocks) over a three-period planning horizon. Thirteen example forests that vary in terms of stand value and spatial dispersion are used to evaluate our heuristic, which outperforms the other approaches tested.