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Our Integrated Forest (or Plantation) Management System has been developed to provide decision support for integrated long, medium and short-term forest management. In other words, it can be used for the strategic planning of forest resources, the tactical planning of medium-term forest operations, the operational planning and control of forestry activities and the monitoring of forest resources. The various components of our IFMS are linked in such a way that managers are able to produce the set of plans that are best overall (across all relevant time horizons and organizational divisions), then control activities to ensure that the plan is properly implemented. IFMS technologies are essential for managers who wish to undertake efficient, effective and sustainable forest management. The standard components of our IFMSs include:
The Forest Inventory System has been developed to provide managers with up-to-date information about their forest resources based upon forest surveys. This information includes: the volumes and values of timber inventories, projected volumes and values of future timber inventories, and the projected amount and value of non-timber forest production. Information is available in the form of tables, graphs or both, as appropriate. In the IFMS, FIS is used to feed vital resource information to PIPM (or ForMAX), OperMAX and OP-PLAN for strategic and operational planning. FIS must be customised to suit the sampling methods and information needs of each client. With the inclusion of the PORTeL component, users are able to view and analyse their inventory data and information using a map interface.
The Forest Maximizer (ForMAX) for natural and plantation forests is an optimization-based system for the long-term, strategic planning of forests and forest estates. They provide managers with the optimal nature, amount and timing of major forest management activities over the life of the analysis (usually incorporating one or more forest rotations). The activities planned would normally include: land acquisition or disposal, planting, stand tending and harvesting. The optimization can be based upon profits, costs, volumes or other criteria and can be constrained by a great variety of factors (including non-timber and non-economic values). The long-term strategic plan that is developed can then be used as the basis of tactical and operational planning. ForMAX now incorporates new goal programming capabilities for multi-objective forest management, variations in period sizes over the management time horizon (allowing for finer temporal resolution in the near term), and the ability to maintain or drop spatial referencing over the analysis period. The new PORTeL component enables managers to more easily classify their forests (including taking into account spatial factors) and view model solutions and scenarios of their land base on a flexible mapping tool.
OperMAX is a decision support system which helps managers develop optimum multi-year, multi-season forest operating plans to produce the lowest costs or highest profits over the entire range of forest activities. OperMAX’s easy-to-use interface (which includes the spatial visualization and spatial analysis capabilities of PORTeL) helps managers develop management scenarios which can then be analyzed using mixed-integer programming identify the optimum plan.
Our forest OPeration PLANning DSS is used for short-term (annual operational) planning, budgeting and scheduling of all major forest activities: harvesting, wood transport, roads, silviculture and support functions. Using the OP-PLAN system with PORTeL, managers can quickly develop draft operating plans on maps of their land base, then conduct sensitivity analyses by modifying any part of the plan and see the effect on costs, profits, volumes and logistical factors or on other parts of the operation. Reports (in the form of tables and graphs) can be viewed at any point in the planning process, while maps of the resulting operations can be reviewed for feasibility. OP-PLAN produces an "official" budget that is to compare to the actual costs tracked by CTS (our cost and production tracking system). CTS is used by managers to monitor and control their forest operations. Once the data has been entered, CTS tracks and reports on revenues, expenses, production, and other of factors used as decision criteria by managers. The actual results can then be compared to the "official" budget produced by OP‑PLAN. Reports are produced as tables and/or graphs and are available "on demand".
NOTE:
The components of the IFMS and the specific linkages between them must usually be custom-designed to suit the clients’ specific needs. For example, the Thai IPMS implementation is composed of our FIS, PIPM, OP-PLAN, CTS and CBM systems described above, as well as two economic forecasting models developed in Thailand. For the Spanish market, FRA's IFMS has focused on natural forest management or park management, and uses ForMAX, a specially designed OP-PLAN/CTS, and FIS integrated with a Geographic Information System. |
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