
“Road network, landing location, and routing optimization for forest smallholders landscapes” is the new article published by researchers Susete Marques and José Borges from the ForChange group at the Centre for Forestry Studies (Centro de Estudos Florestais – CEF).
In this paper, the authors present two mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulations for a well-known integrated network, timber landing location, and routing problem that arises in forest management. The models seek to jointly optimize the construction and maintenance schedule of forest road networks with landing site selection and transportation routing for timber production.

This problem is, in general, difficult to solve as it contains the so-called fixed charge network flow problem, which is known to be NP-hard. One of the proposed MILP formulations considers 3-index continuous variables to represent timber flows on road segments in each period.
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