Seminar on  "Advanced forest management planning techniques and decision support systems" 

by Dr. Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo

Seminar presented at the Research Forest Center on Thursday. 31st October 

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Dr. Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo is Head Researcher at the Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia (CTFC).

This seminar was organized by the project Bioecosys  with the support from the Master Programme MEDfOR (www.medfor.eu/) .
 

Approximation of Pareto frontier in complicated non-linear multi-objective problems,

by Alexander Lotov

Seminar presented by Prof. Lotov at the School of Agriculture, on the 24th October 2019, integrated into the cycle of seminars of "CEF/CEABN: Ecology, Forest and Conservation." 

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The same seminar was presented in University of Évora, on the 15th October 2019. Anf. 1 CLAV-14h. 

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Prof. Alexander Lotov works on the  Dorodnicyn Computing Center, Federal Research Center “Computer Science and Control” of Russian Academy of Sciences, Rússia.

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He is consultant at the Bioecosys Project. 

Abstract:

The seminar is devoted to decision support in the case of complicated multi-objective (multi-criteria) decision problems. Approximating the Pareto frontier and subsequent informing the decision makers about it is now a recognized method of decision support especially in environmental and other public problems in the framework of which multiple decision makers have to be informed about the objective tradeoffs. The method used in our studies (the Interactive Decision Maps (IDM) technique) applies visualization of the tradeoff among the objectives in form of decision maps, i.e. collections of bi-objective slices of the Pareto frontier. The IDM technique is based on approximating the Edgeworth-Pareto hull of the feasible objective set. Then, bi-objective slices of the Pareto frontier can be displayed on request of a user. The IDM technique can be applied in the case of more than four objectives (in the so called many-objective decision problems). A complicated multi-objective problem is considered as an example. It is the problem of constructing control rules for a cascade of reservoirs with criteria reflecting the reliability with which the requirements imposed on the cascade are met. The problem is described by 24 objectives, by several hundreds of decision variables and by non-linear relations between them and objectives. New efficient methods were developed for approximating the Edgeworth–Pareto hull. They combine classical gradient-based methods for scalar optimization and genetic algorithms for Pareto frontier approximation. It was experimentally shown that these methods are significantly superior to the original genetic algorithm in terms of order of convergence and approximation accuracy.

The seminar was supported by the project  BIOECOSYS (PTDC/ASP-SIL/30391/2017).

First Stakeholders’ Workshop of the BIOECOSYS Project

The first workshop of the BIOECOSYS project (“Forest ecosystem management decision making methods an integrated bioeconomic approach to sustainability”) took place March 14 at the Portuguese Catholic University in Porto.

This workshop involved two main activities: a) the presentation of the project and of management planning tools to BIOECOSYS case study area stakeholders (knowledge sharing) and b) computer labs where stakeholders used those tools to select bundles of ecosystem services under alternative climate scenarios (capacity building).

Announcement. First Stakeholders’ Workshop of the BIOECOSYS Project

Presentation of the BioEcosys Project

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14th March 2019.

Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Campus Foz - Rua Diogo de Botelho, 1327, 4169-005 Porto

WShop 1 with focus groups will establish a discussion platform to arrive at a common frame of reference to apply throughout the project period by all disciplines/experts involved in the project.