Productivity development of round wood harvesting - forest machines as an information platform

Original project description:
Information systems in modern forest machines produce large amounts of data during the harvesting process. These information systems of forest machines are also able to receive versatile information e.g. from other devices and forest organizations. However, this technically accessible information flow is not fully exploited. The main objective of the project is to study how these information systems could be exploited and developed in the most efficient way to eliminate bottlenecks in the round wood harvesting chain, including planning, harvesting supervision, operational harvesting planning, harvesting and extraction.

However this project has changed somewhat since it was launched:
We carried out a detailed field experiment on forwarding in the summer 2010. The objective of the field experiment was to study that how the log concentration on the strip-road (volume per distance of the strip-road) and the number of assortments in a load influences a forwarder’s productivity.
In the next summer 2011 we carried an experiment on a new hydraulic cylinder concept which was mounted on a forwarder. This new cylinder concept recycles a potential energy through a small hydraulic accumulator. This experiment was carried out in cooperation with Swedish machine testing institute (SMP) in Umeå.