Sustainable Regional Wood Transport through Cooperative Supply Chain Management Integrating Simulation and AI Technology

Increasingly larger and more frequent climate-related salvage wood crises are creating new, complex challenges for regional wood supply chain management that can no longer be coped with the existing methods currently in use. The overload in planning, design, management, control and monitoring of wood supply chains endangers this crucial sector for Austria’s climate goals. Through cooperative impulses at local, horizontal and vertical levels the project initiates a positive feedback loop, increasing the climate-friendly rail transport of wood and making a significant contribution to a more resilient, sustainable and competitive wood supply chain. The project derives for the first-time concrete strategies and perspectives for a mobility shift in wood transport enabling operating regional infrastructures and local logistics efficiently and in a climate-friendly manner. The pilot implementation of sustainable and cooperative wood transport strategies for critical forestry problem regions such as North-Carinthia in close cooperation with Waldverband Kärnten and RCA Key Account Management Carinthia enables evidence-based transfer to other rural axis areas and regions with low population density throughout Austria (e.g., East-Tyrol, Waldviertel, Mühlviertel). The consortium consisting of BOKU, PLUS, MOLA and RCA forms an ideal interdisciplinary combination contributing significantly to achieve climate targets through the implementation of newly developed, cross-organizational cooperation and business models for sustainable freight mobility, joint use and bundling of resources within and along the wood supply chain. The research approach enables a new generation of multimodal wood supply chain models through the development of agent-, event- and geographic information system-based large-scale simulation models for training a neural network using machine learning. By exploiting the semantic dimension, the explainable GeoAI model can be transferred to other regions as well as to other application contexts (e.g., multimodal and intermodal commodity, food and agricultural supply chains), enabling the development of inter-municipal-operator and inter-company cooperation models along regional supply chains. The advanced digital modelling toolbox and in particular the web-based mobility-shift-demonstrator support local stakeholders in the step-by-step implementation of horizontal and vertical cooperation potentials in wood transport through analyses and visualizations of CO2 savings, rail terminal locations and resource bottlenecks. The research project represents enormous potential for contingency planning as well as risk and crisis management and significantly improves the efficiency, resilience and sustainability of regional wood supply chain management through the web-based mobility transition demonstrator for quantitative decision support. Qualitative components for the extensive involvement of local stakeholders by means of interviews, surveys, case studies and participative workshops complete the holistic research approach and enable the evaluation of critical disablers and enablers as well as the targeted strategy development for the derivation of concrete business models and implementation steps and actions to force a mobility shift in wood transport as a mitigation and adaptation measure for climate and environmental protection.