SIMO (SIMulation and Optimization) is an open-source program for forest management planning. It has been designed with adaptability in mind. You can decide what your data, growth and operation models are like, and how they are applied in the planning process. In fact, SIMO has such a flexible basic structure, that simulations and optimization aren't even limited to forest management planning.

Why use SIMO?

With SIMO your simulations aren't fixed. You can adapt and extend them until they meet your needs. To do this, you don't have to change the program code because SIMO implements a clean separation between the code and the description of the computations.

In SIMO more or less any aspect of the planning system is an XML document. The data and the models are described in XML documents, but also the simulation and optimization logic is contained in XML documents.

Want to change some aspect of the system? Edit the XML.

Because SIMO is an open-source program, you'll also be able to browse the source code to see how things work under to bonnet as well.

A more detailed introduction to SIMO and its use in forest management planning is available in this book.

A brief history of SIMO

The SIMO framework has been developed at the Department of Forest Resource Management at the University of Helsinki. It is the product of a joint three year research project (2004-2007) between University of Helsinki, UPM-Kymmene Ltd., Tornator Oy, Metsämannut Oy, Metsähallitus, Forestry Development Centre Tapio and the Forestry Centres, and The Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes)

Simosol Oy is now the maintainer and main developer of SIMO.

More to come

SIMO is an expert's tool, familiarity with XML is expected in order to get the most out of the system.

Latest release

Version 1.0.0 released on Apr 25, 2016

The license

SIMO is released under the open source GPL 2.0 license

System requirements

SIMO is written in Python so it runs on Windows, Linux and OS X (and quite a few other platforms as well).