Coordination between strategic forest management and tactical logistic and production planning in the forestry supply chain

In this paper, we study the coordination mechanism in the forestry supply chain between strategic forest management and tactical production planning. We first formulate an integrated model to establish a theoretical benchmark for performance of the entire supply chain. It is a mixed integer programming model that involves harvesting, bucking, transportation, production, and sales decisions for both tactical and strategic planning levels. We then present two sequential approaches S-A and S-B where the coordination is done through internal pricing. S-A is the approach currently used in practice where harvesting in the forest is the main driver of the supply chain activities and internal pricing is introduced to control bucking decision in a separate stage. In contrast, S-B takes downstream demand information into consideration and internal pricing directly influences harvesting decision in the first stage. In order to find the appropriate setting of internal pricing that leads to the system optimum, we suggest two heuristics H-I and H-II. The internal pricing in H-I is based on dual values and in H-II, it is derived from a Lagrangian decomposition. A real-life case study in the Chilean forestry industry is used to compare the results of different approaches. It is shown that the new sequential approach S-B generates as good feasible solution as that obtained from the integrated approach but in much less time. Both heuristics H-I and H-II bring about near-optimal feasible solutions. H-II also provides optimistic bound of the optimal objective function value, which can be used as a measure of the solution quality.