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Harnessing the power of IBM Analytics to enable smarter, more sustainable management of forest roads
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Education
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
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.
About The Customer
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. The College 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 Solution
The 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.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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