The Woodstock 2019.8 update includes improvements in organization, navigation, performance and usability as well as Road Optimizer, which provides new capabilities for integrated harvest and road planning.
Remsoft has announced the release of our Woodstock 2019.8 update. Woodstock is a fully integrated modeling and optimization technology platform for forest management planning. With over 25 new features and updates, this major release offers improved organization, navigation, performance and usability, and helps users better understand their model and results.
Refined and innovated over nearly three decades, Remsoft technology handles every facet of planning, optimizing, and managing assets. Rich in new features and improvements to overall system performance, the enhancements within this major release will allow customers to be able to build, analyze and solve complex planning challenges—and do it even faster than before.
Scheduling the Right Activity in the Right Place at the Right Time
This update includes the official launch of our latest module: Road Optimizer. Remsoft’s Road Optimizer bridges the strategic and operational gap in forest planning. Bringing an enhanced level of road detail to harvest scheduling, Remsoft’s new module can align infrastructure and harvest efforts to reduce wood supply costs.
Road Optimizer features built-in reporting to calculate harvest volumes and their demand on road usage, allowing informed decision-making on building and maintaining the right grade of road depending on future volume flows in a spatial context.
Remsoft will help you get started with Road Optimizer by analyzing your Woodstock Model for technical readiness with our Road Optimizer Assessment Service. For more information or for pricing, please contact us at planning@remsoft.com.
Implementing Greenup Constraints in Woodstock
Most forest operations work in areas where harvest planning is constrained by spatial rules (such as minimum and maximum harvest unit size, adjacency constraints, and clustering). Many organizations have been using Spatial Optimizer to create harvest units by aggregating polygons while meeting these spatial requirements. Using Spatial Optimizer creates a more logistically granular and spatially-explicit schedule of activities. With the v2019.8 release, users can go one step further to take the harvest units designed by the Spatial Optimizer algorithm and use these as inputs to Woodstock’s optimization process to assign an optimal harvest timing, while still respecting adjacency rules.
With the greenup constraint syntax, users can declare greenup constraints directly in Woodstock. It allows a solution to satisfy greenup constraints along with all other constraints simultaneously. This syntax generates the constraints automatically, allowing a quick period adjustment for scenarios, and supports different formulations.
Solver Updates
The integration of best-in-breed mathematical solver capabilities, mixed integer programming technology, and mathematical optimization software from both Gurobi and MOSEK make asset lifecycle optimization a more seamless process for Remsoft customers. This enables customers to work with Remsoft as the main solution provider, instead of with different technical support teams. Solver updates have also been included in the release, and users are encouraged to download the latest versions of MOSEK and Gurobi solvers, available on our website.
Reporting Enhancements
Alternative formats for reporting are now available. Multiple system reports, as well as user-defined reports can be written to SQLite (a C-language library that implements a self-contained, serverless SQL database engine), and other databases via ADO (Active Data Object) connections.
Packed with New Features and Optimizations
A significant number of minor updates will be implemented in v2019.8, providing upgrades in overall efficiency and functionality. Clients will see new structures for simplification of data input as well as improved organization and navigation, saving users time on model building and constraint formulation.
Some of our favourite improvements rolling out in v2019
- Search in input files as Woodstock would to locate declarations that match a development type mask
- Execute map scripts within a script or model template using the Integrator keyword “.CALLMAPSCRIPT”
- Use new keyboard shortcut CTRL-D to launch Open file dialog filtered for DBF files
- Run selected lines in map scripts to execute subsets of a larger script, and avoid editing your current script, or generating a separate script
- Use the _VARIABLE keyword to target the values assigned to user-defined variables in the Optimize section to a report file
- Run a second instance of the Interpreter to check syntax while another Interpreter process is running
Remsoft’s latest software update is now available on our website at https://remsoft.com/support/software-downloads/.
View the full list of new features here. View bug fixes and known issues included in this update here.
This major release is immediately available to all customers whose Software Maintenance & Support program with Remsoft is current. Remsoft releases Woodstock Modeling Platform upgrades periodically. It is highly recommended that users upgrade their software to the latest version.
As always, we look forward receiving your feedback on our products. If you experience any technical issues with this release, please contact support@remsoft.com and our Support team will assist you. If your Software Maintenance subscription is not up to date, please contact us directly to find out how you can rejoin the program.
