Integrating natural wood drying and seasonal trucks’ workload restrictions into forestry transportation planning

This paper explores how the consideration of two important practical aspects related to transportation in the forestry industry, wood moisture content and seasonal limitations on the maximal truck's payload, may lead to savings in procurement costs. To this end, it proposes a multi-period mathematical formulation that decides on the location of potential stockyards and the quantities to move from suppliers to yards and from yards to factories at each period. The formulation accounts for the wood's weight loss achieved by natural drying at the stockyard. Drying depends on the number of periods that the wood stays in the yard but also on the particular weather conditions during the length of stay. The formulation also incorporates the dynamic seasonal restrictions on the allowed payload, in an attempt to mitigate their economic impact on transportation costs. Numerical results on randomly generated instances, as well as a real instance provided by a large pulp and paper producer in Québec, Canada, show that important improvements on the logistics’ costs can be achieved by explicitly considering these aspects.