An interactive heuristic approach for the P-forest problem

In this paper, we propose and compare two complementary heuristic approaches for solving the P-forest problem. The first one is a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP), and the second one is an interactive heuristic approach. Contrary to the GRASP, which is a fully automated approach, in the interactive heuristic the user contributes in a cooperative manner to the optimization process. The objective is to exploit the problem-domain expertise of the user in order to generate more realistic solutions that integrate aspects not captured by the objective function. These heuristics were implemented on a decision support system for solving a P-forest problem in the domain of forestry. We present experimental results on real problem instances of access road networks design. A comparison between manual planning and the two heuristics shows clear advantages for using the proposed interactive approach.