Measurement accuracy in the forestry-wood chain

Sammanfattning: A customer-oriented production philosophy and an integrated forestry-wood chain are concepts that researchers and people involved in the forest industry have to deal with in the beginning of this new millennium. Fulfilling the specific requirements for dimension, length or biological features that customers demand for the wood products entails the existence of accurate measurement equipment at each location along the conversion chain. The overall objective of this thesis was to assess the role of measurement accuracy within the production chain. This work focuses on the accuracy of the measurement procedure performed at two key locations in the chain: the bucking operation performed by the harvester in the forest and the scaling-sorting operation performed by the optical scanner at the sawmill's log sorting station. A simulation technique based on the Swedish Pine Stem Bank (SPSB) data and the virtual SawMill (vSM) software, along with field tests and ample sawmill statistics acquired through the Timber Data System (TDS), was employed in this thesis. Simple regression and multivariate statistical technique were used as modeling tools. The overall conclusion of this thesis is that measurement accuracy plays a significant role in the efficiency of the wood conversion chain. Understanding where the biggest problems are located and thereby where development efforts should be concentrated in the future is a step that has to be continually undertaken in further research studies. This might be quite laborious to achieve practically, but is relatively easy with the help of the simulation technique. The Stem Bank data and the vSM are very efficient tools with great potential for simulation and analysis of the measurement accuracy in the forestry-wood chain.