A multi criteria-Choquet based forest resources-allocation mechanism

We design a mechanism that considers multiple criteria aspects to allocate a limited amount of public owned forest resources to competing mills. Our approach considers different evaluations of the mill through its performance according to the three sustainability criteria (economic, environmental and social aspects) and its contribution to the collaborative efforts in coalitions of mills, which is the fourth criterion. Moreover, collaboration is considered along three forest operations, where each mill can belong to more than one coalition at the same time (overlapping coalitions). The coalition configuration value (CCV) is applied to evaluate the fourth criterion in a regional case study in the province of Quebec (Canada). The four criteria are assumed to be dependent and influence each other. This is why, we propose the use of the Choquet Integral as an aggregation function of the four criteria into a single value that takes into account the interactions among the criteria. This aggregated value is used as a unique performance metric of the mills in an optimization model which allocates the wood volumes to the mills proportionally to this performance. When the fourth criteria is calculated by the CCV, the allocation is said to be Choquet-CCV based. We also compare this allocation with the Choquet-least-core-value based where the least core value is used as a measure of the fourth criterion. We also compare these allocations with those obtained from a previous work.