A minimum cost flow approach to the forest regulation problem

The optimum pattern of harvests from an existing forest during the period of its conversion to some desired target can be formulated as a linear programming problem which is traditionally solved by the simplex method. This paper employs network analysis as a solution to this forest regulation problem. Because of its similarity to a trans-shipment problem, the constraint matrix of the regulation problem is found to be totally unimodular. Consequently, a tableau solution method similar to the transportation simplex method can be devised. This new method is efficient because the amount of calculation is small. In addition, the core memory required is less.