KWH4.0 | Center of Excellence for Forestry 4.0

The Center of Excellence for Forestry 4.0 is developing Industry 4.0 digitalization concepts for the forest and wood cluster. The driving force behind this approach is a closely cooperating working group of companies, research centers and the Forestry Education Center  North-Rhine Westphalia as a practical testbed.New, intelligent and decentrally acting machines, devices, services and people, will enable the cluster to optimize its complex value-added networks, develop new business models and meet current challenges from ecology, economy and climate change. Existing approaches address the complexity of structures and processes, and the conflicting demands on forest management only insufficiently. To "smartify" the forest and wood cluster, existing competencies from industry, science and administration must be bundled: The goal of KWH4.0 is to create a know-how base and infrastructures, and to implement forest and wood 4.0 components via innovative Smart Forest Labs. The Smart Forest Labs serve as experimental forestry laboratories in which developed components, systems and processes are tested, standardization advanced, concepts disseminated, and actors trained. Developed concepts and standards are continuously published as practical recommendations, a first version of the communication infrastructure S3I (Internet of Things application) has been established. In addition, there is an increasingly smart fleet: forestry machines have been upgraded to retrieve digital information (GPS position, fuel consumption, production data, etc.) and at the same time networked via alternative radio standards with machines in regions where mobile communication is not possible.