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Title:	A transportation-scheduling system for managing silvicultural projects
Author(s):	Valenzuela, Jorge F.; Balci, H. Hakan; McDonald, Timothy
Date:	2005
Source:	International Journal of Forest Engineering, Vol. 16 No. 1: 65-75
Description:	A silvicultural project encompasses tasks such as sitelevel planning, regeneration, harvestin, and stand-tending treatments. an essential problem in managing silvicultural projects is to efficiently schedule the operations while considering project task due dates and costs of moving scarce resources to specific job locations. Transportation costs represent a significant portion of the total operating costs. The main difficulty in developing suh a management system is finding an optimal transport schedule while handeling complicated constraints, such as precedence and temporal relations among project tasks, project due dates, truck routing, weather, and other operational conditions. It is well known that finding an optimal solution to these types of problems invloved high computational complexity. They are usually NP-hard. For the reason, we propse to use simulated annealing - a meta-heuristic optimization method- that interacts with the precedence and temporal relations among project tasks and logistics are explicitly accounted for. The approach has been tested using data provided by a silvicultural contractor located in Alabama. the results obtained solving one instance of a small size problem with five worksites showed that the best solution could be found in less than four minutes using a personal computer with a processor Pentium III (1 GHz). A good solution for a larger problem with twenty worksites was found in thirty minutes. Also a resource analysis is performend to evaluate the impact of each resource on the best solution.
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