BaSys4Forestry
Cross-company linking of value chains in the forestry industry by integrating forestry services into the BaSys 4 architecture
Motivation
Nearly half of Germany's forest land is in private ownership, much of it fragmented among the 2 million corporate and private forest owners. The processes for the care and management of such forests, as well as the marketing of wood supplies, must be organized by the owners themselves. In most cases, the owners do not have the capital or the necessary technical know-how to implement an end-to-end digital mapping of these processes. In order to increase efficiency and to have more flexibility in negotiations with traders, private forest owners often organize themselves into forest management associations or timber marketing companies. However, these associations solve only part of the structural problems in forestry.
Objective
In the "BaSys4Forestry" project, the concepts of the "Basissystem Industrie 4.0" (BaSys 4) originating from Industry 4.0 will be used to enable every private forest owner to create a digital image - a so-called digital twin - of his forest, over which he can retain full data sovereignty. He can fill this with data and connect it to services from third-party providers and forestry associations. In doing so, they determine the extent to which the information from their digital forest is passed on to service providers and the extent to which the services can modify data.
The aim of the joint project "BaSys4Forestry" is therefore to develop and link prototypes of a digital twin forest as well as services for forest management and timber sales based on the concepts and methods of Forest and Timber 4.0 and the BaSys 4 concepts. The prototypes created will then be tested by users under real conditions.
A particular challenge will be to implement the management of third-party access rights to the data of the Digital Twin based on the BaSys 4 concepts. A large knowledge gain is expected here. Furthermore, in the context of this project, the performance and functionality of the BaSys 4 system will face a particular challenge in the case of limited availability of communication and data links in the forest.
Consortium
BaSys4Forestry is a joint project of the partners RWTH Aachen University with the Chair of Information and Automation Systems for Process and Materials Engineering (PLT, consortium leadership), the Laboratory for Machine Tools (WZL) and the Institute for Human-Machine Interaction (MMI) with the companies Forstify GmbH (Arnsberg), rBITech GmbH (Regensburg) and Weichs Beratungs- und Dienstleistungsgesellschaft UG (haftungsbeschrankt) (Eslohe).
The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through the project management organization Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR) (funding code 01/S21074A-D). The 2-year project duration is 10/2021 to 09/2023.