Locating Forest Roads by a Spatial and Heuristic Procedure Using Microcomputers

Abstract

The spatial and heuristic road locating procedure developed in an earlier study [16] has been improved and integrated using microcomputers. Further applications and results of testing the procedure using the same data are presented. The improved procedure proved to be beneficial in helping forest road planning managers evaluate alternatives and hence select the optimal location for a road network. It contains a heuristic algorithm capable of locating forest roads so as to minimise the total costs and impacts of road construction, wood extraction, and wood transport.

Keywords:

• Roads
• location
• net benefit
• shortest paths
• heuristic
• microcomputers