ANALYZING CLIQUES FOR IMPOSING ADJACENCY RESTRICTIONS IN FOREST MODELS

Adjacency considerations have a significant impact on the acceptabilit y of forest planning alternatives and have forced analysts to look for effective methods for incorporating such concerns. Various attempts h ave been suggested for representing adjacency restrictions with in pla nning problem formulations. This paper investigates the use of cliques for representing adjacency conditions. Several approaches are present ed for generating and incorporating cliques into operational level for est planning formulations. Properties of the various clique sets are d etailed, which form a basis for understanding why certain clique sets outperform others. A number of forest planning problems are solved, de monstrating the superior performance of the clique approach presented in this paper. This work has broad implications on the types of planni ng problems that can be effectively modeled.