Analyzing time and fuel consumption in road transport of round wood with an onboard fleet manager

Abstract

Round wood supply in Austria is often affected by different factors such as bottlenecks or oversupply due to changing market, weather and road conditions. An additional factor impacting the complex wood supply chain is the rising transport costs from the landing to the sawmill. Logging trucks are the primary transportation technology used from the forest to the customer's site. The objectives of this study were to analyze the actual situation and characteristics of typical trucking activities for round wood supply from the region to an Austrian sawmill. The study used time and fuel consumption, proportion of travel on forest roads and average speed on different functional road classes to estimate productivity and costs. Data collection including GPS-tracking was done using fleet management equipment built into the driver's cabin. The GPS-routes were analyzed in ArcGIS 9.3 based on the national road network and its attributes. The sawmill studied with a yearly demand of 600,000 m 3 round wood was located in southern Austria. In total, more than 2,000 round trips operated by seven logging trucks recorded close to 100,000 km. The transport distance from the forest to the sawmill averaged 51 km. The average share on forest roads within a route to the sawmill was 14.2% with an average speed of 13.5 km/h, whereby the forest road is defined as road with minor importance. Transport costs from the forest site to the sawmill with a truck and trailer were € 11/m 3 solid timber based on an average load size of 25 m 3 . An average 0.77 l of diesel fuel per kilometer was consumed during a round trip including all work phases. A trip to an interim storage location consumed 2.05 l/km due to the number of work phases without driving distance.

Carbon balance for different management practices for fast growing tree species planted on former pastureland in southern Europe: a case study using the CO2Fix model

“…A complete study considering life cycle assessment and forest carbon analysis may report different results than obtained in the present study (e.g., McKechnie et al 2011). In a recent study on fuel consumption in road transport of round wood in Austria (Holzleitner et al 2010), the emission per cubic meter of roundwood due exclusively to transport was 2.23 kg C m -3 , considering an average lorry load of 25 m 3 and an average distance (forest industry) of 51 km. This emission must be discounted from the C gain derived from use of wood products.…”

Policy Recommendation from Stakeholders to Improve Forest Products Transportation: A Qualitative Study

“…Concerns regarding higher costs associated with forest products transportation have led to several studies in forest operations including analysis of wood products hauling costs [8][9][10][11]; increasing efficiency in transportation [12][13][14][15]; and survey analysis of logging and transportation sectors [16][17][18][19][20]. Similarly, there are research studies utilizing qualitative methods, such as semi-structured interviews, to comprehend views and opinions of experts [21,22].…”

Fuel consumption and exhaust emissions in the process of mechanized timber extraction and transport

“…Many works are devoted to fuel consumption, energy efficiency and exhaust emissions. In literature, one can often find works discussing the determination of fuel consumption for the performed forest operations (Klvac and Skoupy 2009;Klvac et al 2012;Nordfjell et al 2003;Holzleitner and Kanzian 2011). There are many findings discussing the energy consumption of such operations Berg 2005, 2010).…”

“…The subject of the analysis was the emission of GHG for different methods of logging and transport of timber. The fuel consumption in the transport phase was the subject of research and analyses conducted by Holzleitner and Kanzian (2011). The research described by these authors covered the analysis of transport of timber by a truck on different distances in a selected region of Austria.…”