Solution approaches for solving the log transportation problem

Abstract

Log transportation in the forest industry is a key issue for the success of any firm. This operation involves complex decision making, requiring suitable approaches with high computational performance. The main decisions to be considered are related to the fleet size and log supply to minimize transportation costs. Thus, the number of vehicles to be used, the harvest areas that supply each plant and, the type and quantity of raw material to be transported must be determined. This article focuses on transportation planning. Specifically, the objective is to determine the set of routes to be performed by the truck fleet to supply raw material from harvest areas to plants in order to satisfy their demands. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, an efficient Integer Programming (IP) model is presented to solve this problem; second, taking into account the solution requirements, a Column Generation based approach is developed to obtain near-optimal solutions in a short computational time. Through the examples, both proposals are evaluated and the benefits of each approach are presented.