G-2026-49
NRCan bridges the practicability gap in log transportation optimization
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référence BibTeXLog transportation accounts for up to 40% of operating costs in the Canadian
forestry sector Audy et al. (2023), yet optimization tools for
transportation planning have seen little adoption in practice. Planners set them
aside because they omit critical operational constraints, cannot evolve as
business constraints change, and offer no way to recover when disruptions invalidate
the plan. Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) designed and validated an end-to-end decision support system (DSS) for
large-scale log-truck routing and scheduling. At its core, the system brings
together three analytics and optimization contributions. The first is an exact
and comprehensive formulation of the multi-period routing and scheduling problem
on a time-space network, solved at industrial scale through a tailored
relax-and-fix/fix-and-optimize decomposition. The second is an implicit constraint learning
framework that embeds trained machine learning predictors into the model as
linear constraints, so that plans self-adjust to evolving planner preferences
without manual re-engineering. The third is a dynamic reoptimization algorithm
that combines local branching with reinforcement learning to recover
near-optimal schedules under disruptions such as road closures, truck breakdowns,
or travel delays, while staying close to the original plan. Deployed as a web-based platform within NRCan, the system is estimated, in
its first industrial validation with a major Canadian forest company, to
generate approximately $8 million in annual savings and to avoid
4 800 tonnes of CO\(_2\) per year. National adoption is projected to yield
up to $377 million in annual fuel savings and to avoid more than 500 000 tonnes of
CO\(_2\) per year, directly supporting Canada's net-zero objectives.
Paru en septembre 2026 , 18 pages
Ce cahier a été révisé en octobre 2026
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