Development of an economically sustainable and balanced tactical forest management plan: a case study in Québec

In Canada, most of the forests are publicly owned and forest products companies depend on timber licenses issued by the provincial governments for their wood supplies. According to the Sustainable Forest Development Act effective in the province of QuĂŠbec since April 2013, the government is responsible for harvest area selection and timber allocation to companies. This is a complex tactical planning decision, with important impacts on downstream economic activities. Moreover, in order to avoid high-grading of forest resources and to determine a sustainable tactical plan which ensures a stable level of availability, quality and cost of supply over several years, it is necessary to simultaneously take these criteria into consideration during the planning process. We propose a mixed-integer nonlinear goal-programming formulation while employing Nadir theory as a reliable scaling technique to model this multi-objective planning problem. The model is solved by a linearization approach for a real case in the province of QuĂŠbec. The proposed solution method enables us to obtain good-quality solutions for relatively large cases. Results show the proposed model outperforms conventional cost-minimization planning strategy by ensuring a more balanced use of wood supply and costs for all stakeholders over a longer period.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author