A new approach to modeling the routing problem in forest inventory planning

In many activities linked to wood production, The completion of forest inventories is an essential step for building the strategic and tactical planning of companies, being fundamental to the decision-making process. In forestry companies with large areas of planting, the number of plots installed is very large, which can require planning to efficiently determine which plots to measure in which periods of time. In this context, this research presents a new approach to represent and obtain solutions for the Vehicle Routing Problem in forest inventory planning. To this end, an adapted model of the Periodic Routing Problem of Vehicles with Time Windows (PRPVJT) was proposed. The solution methods analyzed were the exact branch-and-cut method, using the CPLEX solver, the Iterated Local Search (ILS) and Simulated Annealing (SA) metaheuristics. In order to analyze the performance of the methods, instances of different sizes were created for solving the problem. The results obtained demonstrate that the methods were effective in solving the problem, especially in the larger instances. The Simulated Annealing (SA) metaheuristic generated the best results when compared to the other methods.