John Paul McTague

Rayonier, Inc., Southern United States of America

Rayonier, Inc. conducts harvest scheduling using mathematical programming with a Model I structure to create its strategic and tactical harvest plans. A large integer formulation is used to solve the cutting schedule for the entire Rayonier timberlands of the southern United States. The inclusion of terminal values in the objective function coefficients allows the model to be practically invariant to the length of the planning horizon. The matrix is sparse since the technological coefficients represent harvest volumes rather than standing volumes, creating an efficient formulation of the linear programming problem. The matrix does not employ accounting rows, and summarization of the basic solution is conducted in the report writer. The customized regime generator produces an efficient number of decision variables for each stand given its age, density, and volume. The technological coefficients are generated with a stand-table projection approach that furnishes precise product merchandizing.