Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

McConnell, Thomas Eric (Major Professor)

Committee Member

Tanger, Shaun M. (Co-major Advisor)

Committee Member

Crosby, Michael K.

Committee Member

Marufuzzaman, Mohammad

Committee Member

da Silva, Bruno Kanieski

Other Advisors or Committee Members

Polinko, Adam; Henderson, James

Date of Degree

12-8-2023

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Forestry

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Forest Resources

Department

Department of Forestry

Abstract

Timber haulage in Mississippi incurs the greatest portion of logging expenses because of a myriad of closed and posted (restricted) bridges. This study utilized Dijkstra's algorithm method in ArcGIS Pro to derive 129 feasible shortest optimal trucking routes between 46 harvest sites and 32 softwood sawmills in Mississippi. Among these routes, 30 of them had restricted bridges along the way; however, only 13 viable alternative routes were identified due to distance and weight restrictions. The additional trucking distance for alternative routes ranged between 1.5 to 12.9 miles, whose effect on transportation cost was determined using a Mixed Integer Linear Programming optimization model incorporating weight limits of the restricted bridges. Restricted bridges along optimal routes resulted in an additional transportation cost of $4.09 million, representing a 4.07% increase in total transportation cost or 0.34 per ton of softwood sawlogs transported. All these cost increases were exclusive to softwood sawlogs.

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