A Cultural Algorithm for Spatial Forest Harvest Scheduling

Abstract

This paper proposes a cultural algorithm for the spatial forest harvest scheduling for maximizing the total harvested timber volume, under the constraints of minimum harvest age, minimum adjacency green-up age, and approximately even volume flow for each period of the schedule. In order to increase the solution-search ability, the cultural algorithm extracts problem-specific information during the evolutionary solution search to update the belief space of a generation, which has cultural influences and guidance on the next generation. The key design of our cultural algorithm is to propose the cultural and evolutionary operators specifically for the problem. Experimental analysis shows that our cultural algorithm performs better than the previous approaches.