Abstract

Timber transport plays an important part in the overall operational costs of forest industries. Depending on their size, typical large forest firms move between 500,000 and 3,000,000 cubic meters a year, with transportation budgets ranging from US $5 to 20 million. We developed an operative and computerized system, ASICAM, based on a simulation process with heuristic rules, to support daily truck scheduling decisions. It can be used on any personal computer and runs for about three minutes on a PC 486 for larger problems. ASICAM has been implemented in eight of the largest forest firms in Chile, reducing costs and improving overall operation and work efficiency.