Analyzing cliques for imposing adjacency restrictions in forest models

Abstract

Adjacency considerations have a significant impact on the acceptability of forest planning alternatives and have forced analysts to look for effective methods for incorporating such concerns. Various attempts have been suggested for representing adjacency restrictions within planning problem formulations. This paper investigates the use of cliques for representing adjacency conditions. Several approaches are presented for generating and incorporating cliques into operational level forest planning formulations. Properties of the various clique sets are detailed, which form a basis for understanding why certain clique sets outperform others. A number of forest planning problems are solved, demonstrating the superior performance of the clique approach presented in this paper. This work has broad implications on the types of planning problems that can be effectively modeled.