Developing GIS based Decision Support System for Planning Transportation of Forest Products

Transportation of forest products is a complex problem that requires evaluation of many alternative routes. This indicates the necessity of using computer-assisted methods in planning transportation of forest products and systematically searching for the optimum route. In this study, Geographical Information System (GIS) based decision support system was used to decide the optimum route which minimizes the transportation cost of various forest products (i.e. logs, industrial wood, paper, mine pole). The study area was implemented in Mustafakemalpaşa Forest Enterprise Directorate (FED) located in the city of Bursa. There were three Forest Enterprise Chiefs (Paşalar, Sarnıç, Turfal) and five forest depots in the study area. Three depots were in Paşalar Forest Enterprise Chief (FEC), while the other FECs had one depot each. The optimum routes, providing the most economic transportation from temporary timber bunching areas (total of 41 areas) at the forest to forest depots, were determined by using Network Analyst extension of ArGIS 10.2 program. Also, the road sections located in inaccessible areas under landslide risk were disregarded during network analysis for safety purposes. In the solution process, two scenarios were applied: 1) the forest products extracted from a FEC were only transported to the depot(s) of that FEC, and 2) the forest products extracted from any FEC were transported to any of the depots in the study area. The results indicated that the total transportation cost was 88424 TL in the first scenario, while it was dropped to 88161 TL in the second scenario. It was found that transportation cost was relatively low in the FECs with more than one forest depots. The other important factor that affects the cost was the distance between temporary timber bunching areas and forest depots.