Industry 4.0 beyond the Factory: An Application to Forestry

Industries like paper, packaging or furniture heavily rely on wood as basic resource, making the forestry sector an important part of the economy. However, the woods are not only an economic resource, but also a public good with significant cultural and ecological importance. This results in numerous boundary conditions and regulations, which aim at ensuring sustainable use. In combination with a high degree of division of labor and highly decentralized work processes within the sector, this results in highly complex value-added chains with a large number of stakeholders. Numerous innovative technological solutions exist, that aim at solving individual problems, yet, an overarching approach and infrastructure allowing for the realization of integrated value added networks is still missing.Based on the manufacturing industries experience with Industry 4.0, we present a new concept Forestry 4.0. Its technical realization involves connecting wood resources, data sets, existing and new hard- and software components as well as stakeholders into a novel Internet of Things, Services, and People in forestry. Its nodes are Digital Twins which describe their corresponding real world artifacts, predict control their behavior, and integrate them into surrounding systems processes. In this way, Forestry 4.0 aims at integrating currently isolated artifacts and at revealing the potential of new technological solutions and business models. Finally, we show first steps of implementing this concept within a multidomain simulation system and present a strategy for the concepts dissemination into the forestry sector.