Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

The cost of forwarding corresponds to about one tenth of the forestry industries raw material cost. This gives a motive to do good follow-ups to get a good overview of the forwarding distance and, thus, enable improvements. Follow-ups are also justified by the possibility to make more accurate calculations of the harvesting costs, if better estimations of forwarding distance are achieved.

Today (2009) Stora Enso has GPS and vehicle-computers in most of their forwarders. These are used mainly for the forwarder to follow the tracks of the harvester and for the planning leader to see how the forwarder has been driving within the stand. However, the techniques have also other possible uses.

The objective of this Master thesis was to evaluate the planned forwarding distance against the actual forwarding distance in thinned stands and to come up with a method for calculating the actual forwarding distance in GIS-environment.

The data collected was planned forwarding distance (plus the written instructions to the machine operators), odometer forwarding distance and the tracks created by the GPS during the forwarders work. The tracks were then worked up in ArcGIS 9.3 to get a more correct forwarding distance. The planned forwarding distance was evaluated against actually recorded forwarding distance based on odometric and on ArcGIS calculations.

The results show that the planned forwarding distance is substantially underestimated and should be increased by a higher winding coefficient than today (1, 15). The results also indicate that the follow-ups by odometer could be replaced by follow-ups made by the forwarding distance calculated in ArcGIS. However, a condition to make it possible to do the follow-ups in ArcGIS with a reasonable work effort is that there must be precise restrictions on how and when GPS recordings should be done during the forwarding work.