Goal programming for reconciling economic, even-flow, and regulation objectives in forest harvest scheduling.

To resolve the traditional quantifiable but incommensurate objectives of perfect regulation, maximization of present net worth, and even-flow harvest, goal programming (GP) was applied to a sample forest, providing optimal solutions for each goal and a compromise solution that jointly considered all three as weighted goals. Goal programming overcame problems of infeasible specification and satisfied alternate criteria in cases with multiple optima. The GP approach provided a means of considering each of the three goals and minimizing the appropriately weighted deviations. - Authors