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Sándor F. Tóth Associate Professor of Natural Resource Informatics University of Washington

The College of the Environment at the University of Washington studies the earth’s atmosphere, land and water systems, and humanity’s impact on them. It also researches engineering and technological solutions to environmental problems, and the impact of government policies on environmental change.

Business challengeHow could the College of the Environment at the University of Washington help a state department to manage its extensive forest road network with minimum environmental impact?

TransformationAn IBM optimization solution is helping the College design smarter routes for timber harvests, reduce the size of the forest road network, and minimize the environmental impact of forestry operations.

University of WashingtonHarnessing the power of IBM Analytics to enable smarter, more sustainable management of forest roads

“Problems that were intractable a few years ago can now be solved in seconds with IBM Analytics.”

Sándor F. Tóth

Associate Professor of

Natural Resource Informatics

University of Washington

Business benefits:

Drives greener, more cost-efficient management of forest resources

2% potential increase in timber revenues through more efficient harvesting

15% of the forest roads could be retired, reducing impact on salmon and other wildlife

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Seeking ways to optimize the management of forest roads

The College of the Environment at the University of Washington collaborates with many external companies and agencies, including a US state government department that manages approximately 2.1 million acres of working forest on state trust lands.

The department also manages upwards of 15,000 miles of forest roads statewide, which are essential to enable machinery and people to reach remote areas of the forest for timber harvesting, maintenance or recreation purposes.

The College is tasked with researching the best, most sustainable ways to support the department in its complex mission to maintain the forest road network and help timber companies optimize their harvesting processes – while keeping costs and environmental impact to a minimum.

Sándor F. Tóth, Associate Professor of Natural Resource Informatics at the University of Washington, takes up the story, “I have been working on combinatorial optimization problems that arise in natural resource management since about 2002. When I started out, computational optimization was practically in its infancy: the software available back then was only capable of solving small-scale problems. We had no way of calculating really complex algorithms because we lacked the required computational power.

“For example, we had no way of answering key questions such as ‘How can we schedule maintenance, reconstruction and other required activities in the forest?’ ‘How much is this road contributing to the level of sediment in the forest’s streams and rivers, and how will this affect the natural habitat for fish?’ ‘Can we retire part of the forest road network while at the same time making timber harvests more efficient?’”

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“In the last few years, the advances in optimization technology have been tremendous, so we decided to look at more powerful, cutting-edge computational tools that could help us solve complex problems and advise our government partners on better ways to manage their forestry operations. This, ultimately, would contribute to keeping our forests more sustainable, and preserving the environment for local people, visitors and wildlife.”

Cutting-edge technology shapes smarter decisionsThe College chose to implement IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimizer with Concert Technology, a mathematical optimization solution that enables researchers to build efficient optimization models and then solve highly complex problems to identify the best solutions within the given constraints. In this case, the aim was to integrate the existing models used to schedule the timber harvests with a new model for scheduling forest road maintenance.

This would allow the government and timber companies to coordinate and optimize the timing of the harvest and the maintenance of forest roads – not only to save money on operations, but also to assess whether it was necessary to keep maintaining the entire forest road network, or if some of the roads could be retired.

Sándor F. Tóth explains, “We tested our integrated model for one of the largest independent planning districts that our government partner manages, which has about 5,000 management units and over 25,000 road segments.

“Using IBM CPLEX ILOG Optimizer and Concert Technology, we were able to model these issues to a very high level in about five and a half hours – an amazing result given the massive size of the problem.”

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Solution components•IBM® ILOG® CPLEX® Optimizer with

Concert Technology

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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2015, IBM Corporation, 1 New Orchard Road, Armonk, NY 10504 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America, December 2015.

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Chipping away costs and environmental damageThe findings delivered by the IBM solution revealed that it will possible to retire approximately 15 percent of the total length of the road network and still increase its net present value by up to two percent.

“This has been a win-win situation for our government partner because the fewer roads they have to manage, the cheaper and more sustainable it becomes. Furthermore, the public is happier, as people don’t like to be surrounded by roads and logging trucks when hiking or enjoying the outdoors,” says Sándor F. Tóth.

Thanks to the IBM Analytics solution, the College can also start modeling the location, orientation, slope, soil type and vegetation cover of each road segment, which enables it to estimate how much each road segment is contributing to sediment delivery downstream.

Sándor F. Tóth explains: “The erosion of forest roads increases the amount of sediment that is delivered into the forest stream system – and sediment has an impact on fish populations, especially salmon. By retiring the roads that we don’t need, we can reduce sediment delivery and minimize the impact on wildlife in our rivers and streams.”

He concludes, “Problems that were completely intractable when I was in graduate school can now be solved in a matter of seconds with solutions like ours. Leveraging IBM Analytics has been a transformative experience for us, and one that we are happy to share with other organizations that wish to achieve similar goals.”

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