Abstract
Timber transport plays an important part in the overall operational costs of forest industries. Depending on their size, typical large forest firms move thousands or millions of cubic meters of wood per year with annual transportation budgets of several millions of dollars. Timber transport vehicle routing problems including dispatching and scheduling ones have special features such as changing pick-up sites, various timber types and sizes, time windows, road use restrictions and different configurations of trucks. Most of these problems have high combinatorial complexity and are difficult to mathematically model and optimally solve. Therefore, other alternatives, such as the use of simulation models, have currently proven to be more flexible and efficient at solving problems of this nature. An operative and computerized system designed for the Chilean forest industry, ASICAM, based on a simulation process with heuristic rules to support daily truck scheduling decisions is presented. It can be used on any personal computer and for larger problems runs for less than one minute on a PC with a Pentium processor. The system has been implemented in eight of the largest forest firms in Chile, reducing costs and improving overall operation and work efficiency. Approaches to solving forest transportation problems in other parts of the world are also described. Prime goals of this technology is to deliver wood on-time and at the right cost to the customer.