Detailed scheduling of harvest teams and robust use of harvest and transportation resources

Planning activities of harvest teams (harvesting and forwarding) and transportation is critical for efficient procurement of roundwood from forests to mills. The planning process involves many integrated decisions that consider process, spatial and temporal aspects. The spatial aspect concerns which area to harvest, which machine team to use, the mill to which the timber should be allocated and where to store the timber. The process decisions involve which bucking instruction to use. The temporal aspect concerns when to harvest, when to transport in order to meet specific demand at mills, and when to store the timber. Temporal decisions also include determining a detailed schedule for each harvest team. Such a schedule includes starting time and movement time between harvest areas. This is complicated by the harvest team having different home bases and different machine systems with their specific performance description and capacities. The overall planning problem can be formulated into one optimization model, but such a model is too large for practical use and cannot be solved in a reasonable time. We propose a decomposition scheme where a sequence of aggregated models, or limited parts of the model, is solved to find high-quality solutions quickly. We test the scheduling in cases involving two large Swedish forest companies.