Applications of Multicriteria Techniques to Plan the Harvest of a Forest Taken into Account Different Kinds of Objectives

This chapter addresses the operational planning of a forest bearing in mind that forest management involves a multiplicity of goods and services. The proposed model not only includes economic and sustainable development objectives but also takes into account the key role trees play in counteracting the greenhouse effect. In addition, we add adjacency constraints to limit the maximum contiguous area where clear-cutting can be carried out. The solution to the proposed model provides a set of efficient management plans that are of assistance in analyzing the tradeoffs between the economic and ecological objectives. The model is first applied to a plantation owned by a Cuban company, and then to randomly generated simulated forests to compare its performance in other contexts. As the problem is a multiobjective integer nonlinear model, metaheuristic procedures are used to solve it since exact methods would be very expensive.