Strategic planning in a forest supply chain: a multigoal and multiproduct approach

Supply chain management problems are widespread across all economic activities. We analyze here how to address these in the case of the forest industry, which in emerging economies such as Argentina is subject to high logistic costs and faces problems of biological and economic sustainability. In this work, we analyze a management model covering from the schedule of harvesting activities and the transportation of raw materials to the final transformation at several industrial plants. Since this involves more than one objective, single-criterion mathematical programming methods are not appropriate. Here, instead, we introduce an extended goal programming formulation of the problem, able to yield good solutions in a computationally efficient way. We consider four goals: the maximization of the net present value of the production, the minimization of interannual variations in harvests, the maximization of carbon capture in the form of forest biomass, and the minimization of variations in the mean annual distance covered in transportation to the industrial plants. We apply this theoretical model to derive solutions for an actual Argentinean company. We show that the model reaches the target levels of the different goals, except for carbon balance, which is negative in all of the scenarios under evaluation.