9314779 Guignard-Spielberg This Americas Program award will support Dr. Monique Guignard- Spielberg, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Andres Weintrab, of the University of Chile, in a research collaboration to design efficient solution methods for management problems in North American and Chilean forests. Medium to long range integrated management decisions, such as timber cutting, building of access roads, timber transportation, and others, must be made in the presence of environmental constraints such as wildlife habitats and cutting areas. Research results will provide foresters with better tools for devising efficient solution methods in the face of these constraints and will advance the state of the art in solving hard combinatorial programming problems. Efficient management of natural resources is becoming increasingly important around the world and in Chile in particular, with its strong forestry industry. For this project, the Chilean side will focus on heuristics and the design and development of special codes intimately bound to the forestry environment, while the U.S. side will concentrate on efficient modelling, obtaining tight bounds on the integer optima via Lagrangean techniques and designing Lagrangean heuristics. ***
