Predicting terminal time and final crop number for a forest plantation stand: Pontryagin's Maximum Principle

Abstract

A lot of work has gone into developing management strategies for forest plantation stands. Analysts have resorted to the use of dynamic programming to find an optimum management strategy for a stand. The sterile 'curse of dimensionality' in dynamic programming computations has lead to the pursuit of alternative heuristic search algorithms that are plagued with the inherent inability to verify optimality. Optimality in stand management has always been a lingering issue in forest literature, since stand optimisation formulations started appearing in forest science journals from the early 1960s. Pontryagin's Maximum Principle was long cited as a potential exact solution technique, but there was..