Rosalia Jaffray

Operational forest machine scheduling remains dominated by site-specific tools that are difficult to transfer, audit, and compare across studies. The recent systematic review by Jaffray et al. highlights this gap and calls for reusable, transparent planning workflows. FHOPS addresses that requirement by providing an open-source operational planning platform built around a common scenario contract, a solver stack (mixed-integer programming plus SA/ILS/Tabu heuristics), and a unified evaluation layer for schedule quality, robustness, and cost interpretation. We demonstrate the platform on a reproducible British Columbia (BC) ground-based dataset ladder (tiny7, small21, med42) plus synthetic scaling tiers, with manuscript tables and figures generated directly from versioned benchmark assets. This paper documents the reusable software platform and baseline evidence; detailed rolling-horizon design analysis and broader deployment studies are treated as companion modelling work.

Sustainable forest management (SFM) is critical for ensuring that forests provide social, economic, and environmental benefits for generations to come. Forest management planning is often presented...