Technodiversity Glossary

Controlling is one of the auxiliary functions of harvesting. It does not directly change the state of the working object or its position, but steers these operations and deals with the data (logistics). In Technodiversity, controlling is not mentioned intensively; but nevertheless here a great potential for innovations and efficiency is covered.

Before a decision maker decides to buy a machine, e. g., he should estimate the probable costs and earnings and calculate the net income.

The earnings normally depend on the market and cannot be influenced. So, the cost side is that one, where the decision maker can ‘earn or burn money’.

In some cases, the cost of any future operation can be assessed very easily, because the decision maker has his own experience.But very often, he must estimate the costs based on very foggy data. They are unclear, because the costs will occur in future, for example in the next 6 years.

We sub-divide cost calculations due to the time when we make them: pre-calculation, interim-calculation and post-calculation.

(See more at TDiv PR1-C01 and PR1-C02)

See engineering formula

Economic effectiveness asks whether the result of an action fulfils the objective, in this case the economic goal. Sometimes, when it is not possible to measure the grade of fulfilment, it must be estimated. But sometime the fulfilment can be measured - like with coverage.

Imagine that you have a forest stand, which is opened-up with trails that have a distance of 40 meters. One option that you have selected is the standard combination of harvester and forwarder. The problem is that the crane outreach is only 10 m and only 50 % of the stand can be harvested. So, the effectiveness of this solution is 50 %.

You might add a worker with chainsaw, who fells those trees, which are outside the crane reach, towards the trail. Now, all trees can be reached and harvested. The effectiveness climbs up to 100 %.It often happens, that some technical options cover less than 100 %. Therefore, coverage is one attribute to measure the effectiveness.

(See more at TDiv PR1-C01)

The cut-to-length (ctl) method is one of four different functional groups of harvesting methods. The others are fulltree, tree length and chip method.

The character of ctl-methods is that the trees are brought to the forest road in form of short logs.

There are several ways to do it: (a) Trees are converted into logs directly in the stand (i.e., felling-delimbing-crosscutting in a smooth single pass). Or (b) trees can be delimbed inside the stand right after felling, but they are crosscut into logs after the stem lengths have been pre-skidded to the trail. Or (c) one may pre-skid full trees to the trail and perform there the delimbing and cross-cutting – so they are extracted as logs. After extraction (d), the logs can be transported directly to the factory as such or turned into chips before transport.

(See more at TDiv PR1-B07)