Mikael Rönnqvist, Honorary Doctor of Forest Sciences

Mikael Rönnqvist is active in the field of operations analysis, and his research aims to improve planning and operation in forestry supply chains, which are vital for customer value, profitability and the environment. Mikael Rönnqvist is currently professor of industrial engineering at Université Laval in Canada. He received his doctorate in mathematics from Linköping University in 1986, and has previously worked in Sweden, New Zealand and Norway, before moving to Canada in 2012. His list of publications is extensive, and includes around 130 articles in scientific journals.

Mikael Rönnqvist has made significant contributions to forest research and to the forest industry by developing and applying operational analysis methods to the forest sector’s value chain. Rönnqvist is one of the creators of the concept behind ‘Krönt vägval’, a tool used to calculate the most efficient route for forest transport. This tool is now used by approximately 100 forestry companies.

SLU has successfully collaborated with Mikael Rönnqvist on many occasions, including in the development of the Heureka decision support system. He has also collaborated with SLU ecologists to solve optimisation problems regarding strategies for choosing forests to be set aside as reserves. In addition, he has contributed to both Bachelor’s and doctoral courses and initiated several e-learning tools dealing with supplying raw materials to the forest industry. The most famous of these is the ‘Wood Supply Game’, an award-winning educational game freely available to users worldwide.