Speaker
Description
More competitive wood supply is dependent upon increasing load sizes for timber trucks. With a background of increasing percipitation and temperatures the latest revision of Norwegian forest road standards have been adapted with improved construction and drainage specifications. However, the existing forest road network has been constructed over a time span of 60 years, throughout the evolution of truck combinations to the current 60t/24m standard. At present both 65, 68 and 74t truck-trailer combinations are being run on a test basis in Norway.
With this background, road upgrading investments require documentation of prioirities for effective transport operations. The goal of the study was therefore to map out the key challenges of todays forest road network from a transport availability perspective. The purpose is to map out the most critical factors for improving road availability and competitive roundwood transport.
The study provides a national analysis covering both lowland and mountainous topographies on the eastern- and western sides of the Scandinavian mountain range. The first part presents the results of focus group interviews mapping the key dimensions of current challenges (30 trucking companies). The second part presents a quantitiative analysis of transport messaging during 2024 and 2025 reporting i) noncompliance with road standards and i) consequent delivery delays (all Norwegian wood supply organizations).
The quantitative analysis is enabled by new functionality in the forest sector transport system (SkogData VSYS-transport). The existing transport messaging (PapiNet std) includes load-level data such as wood order/transport order identification, time stamp, origin-destination coordinates, loaded transport distance, public road standard (GVW class), wood assortment code and load volume. Since 2024 noncompliancies have been registered within the same system. The noncompliance category for forest roads includes 6 sub-categories: bearing capacity, road width, road grade, landing grade, roadside vegetation and insufficient snow removal/sanding (with explanatory free text). Noncompliances are linked to a secondary function for resulting transport order delays («TO parking»). TO delays have 6 sub-categories of underlying factors: public roads, private roads, forest roads, delay until improved bearing capacity, delay until road/turnaround is improved, and other factors (eg. receiver status).
In this presentation the STT project (STT; Forest road conditions and availability) reports seasonal distributions and durations for 33 000 non-compliances and 15 500 delivery delays during 2024 and 2025. AI-assisted interpretation of free text descriptions provided a more detailed distributions of underlying factors. These are seen in the context of risk evaluations by 30 transport companies, where seasonal transport conditions vary considerably between coastal and interior regions.
| Keywords | roads, logistics, information systems |
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