Balancing equity and efficiency of goal programming for use in forest management planning

Developing forest management plans from a multicriteria perspective requires the decision maker to state preferences regarding the criteria and their importance. This article demonstrates the feasibility of merging the weighted goal programming formulation and the minimax goal programming formulation as a means to provide the decision maker the opportunity to decide which goals are to be treated in a weighted goal programming (the efficient solution) manner or in a minimax goal programming (the equitable solution) manner. The combination of these two goal planning variants is done through partitioning the criteria into sets to be treated by the different variants. The two methods proposed in this paper assign different criteria to a set where the balance of the achievements is desired or to a different set where the maximum aggregated achievement is desired. The first method is designed to create alternative plans, based only on the assignment of criteria to different partitions. The second method requires that the decision maker has a clear understanding of how he/she wishes to deal with each criterion. The functionality of these methods of goal planning is shown with an example derived from a forest management planning situation.