Chapter Summary

Forest operations planning can be considered the tertiary level in a hierarchical forest management planning process and the initial step in the management of the supply chain of the forest industry. However, despite its vital role in and its pivotal position as the nexus of these two these processes, forest operations management has too often been considered to be the “poor cousin” of both. Forest managers frequently consider their job to be done when interventions have been localized spatially and temporally, with the temporal resolution being quite coarse and the actions specified in only a general way. Supply chain managers, on the other hand, often occupy themselves with the “real” logistics problems to be solved after roundwood arrives at the mill gates. This should not be taken to imply that the problem has been entirely ignored from either perspective. Research and development aimed at the solution of various operations management problems has been undertaken using optimization, simulation, and various heuristic methods. Some of the approaches have even been explicitly designed to recognize, at least to some extent, the integrating role of forest operations management in hierarchical forest management and supply chain management. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that better operational planning tools could be developed, especially if they were based upon a good understanding of operational planning processes within the larger production planning contexts. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model of the industrial forest operation planning processes and relationships that can be used to design better decision support tools.

Learning Outcomes

In this chapter students will learn multi-year and annual forest operations planning using optimization and simulation. They will:

Chapter Key Points

Key points covered in this chapter include: