SADPOF

General System description

SADPOF

System name: Sistema de Apoio à Decisão em Planeamento Operacional Florestal Acronym: SADPOF

Brief overview

Web based application for optimized forest operational planning (FOP). Currently solves harvest scheduling integrated with eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus, Labill) wood logs and biomass assortment and assignment, under the scope of an integrated pulp and paper company.

Scope of the system

SADPOF allows forest practitioners to simulate alternative FOP scenarios and computer economical and ecological scenario evaluation indicators for further scenario comparison. The results of the selected management scenario can be visualized into a GIS integrated module or presented in several pre-defined reports, like the Operational Plan.

System origin

The SADPOF prototype has developed in 2007-2008 in the course of Portuguese funding research project, coordinated by the IT Company Link Consulting [1], with the scientific partnership of Instituto Superior de Agronomia (ISA) [2] and the forest business experts from Grupo Portucel Soporcel portucelsoporcel.com/pt/. The latter were involved during the entire project and provided real-life requirements and test cases, which motivated the models and optimization algorithms developed by ISA. This prototype was publically presented to the Iberian Forest community during the FOP workshop organized by the partnership.

It is still a work in progress as its current version implements a sub-set of the foreseen SADPOF functionalities. Further developments can include its productization and installation into real-life application cases.

Support for specific issues

SADDPOF aims to provide optimized FOP scenarios and facilitate subsequent trade-off analysis. Its current scenarios establish monthly harvest schedules for different wood product assortments as well as its distribution networks from harvest sites to transformation centers, including terminals for intermediate storing. The harvest scheduling sub-problem accounts for spatial constraints, monthly forest roads accessibility and contractual obligations forcing harvest to occur before land rental contract expiration. The distribution sub-problem fulfills the monthly qualified destinations demands and relays on other specific transportation-distribution constraints, like road and railway transportation costs minimization, terminals maximum storing capacity and maximum storing time.

Furthermore, its novel technical architecture foresees specific decision support features, such as user’s scenario parameterization screens, scenario cloning for creating new scenarios based on existents, scenarios queue for accessing its processing status and automatically triggers simulation and optimization events. The GIS visualization and reporting templates meet the users’ real-life requirements.

SADPOF forest tactical/operational planning problems

Support for specific thematic areas of a problem type

• Silvicultural
• Product Assortment
• Assignment and distribution
• Development choices / land use zoning

Further developments will implement transportation planning and crews scheduling.