Condition Monitoring and Maintenance of Forest Roads

The Intelliway collaborative project – Condition Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance for Forest Roads – aims to establish a nationwide digital twin for forest roads, including an end-to-end data chain covering the monitoring, maintenance and use of forest roads, as well as to establish an open standard for forest road construction. This will enable digital communication and the exchange of information between different applications, from condition monitoring through to predictive maintenance of forest roads.

In the work package led by the Professorship of Forest Utilisation and Timber Markets, the operational and business models of providers of basic technologies for adding value to road data are analysed and compared with the needs of potential data users (e.g. forestry enterprises, tourism associations and the timber industry), as well as the willingness of potential ‘data collectors’ to collect data on road conditions. In combination with qualitative interviews with experts and stakeholder workshops, digital business models for adding value to road-condition data are designed and developed, with the aim of enabling predictive, cost-reducing planning of road maintenance and repair in the medium to long term. In addition, the project examines how the developed business models can achieve the highest possible level of acceptance, thereby ensuring their feasibility and implementation in practice.