Research

Increasingly larger and more frequent climate-related salvage wood crises are creating new, complex challenges for regional wood supply chain management that can no longer be coped with the existing methods currently in use. The overload in planning, design, management, control and monitoring of wood supply chains endangers this crucial sector for Austria’s climate goals. Through cooperative impulses at local, horizontal and vertical levels the project initiates a positive feedback loop, increasing the climate-friendly rail transport of wood and making a significant contribution to a more resilient, sustainable and competitive wood supply chain. The project derives for the first-time concrete strategies and perspectives for a mobility shift in wood transport enabling operating regional infrastructures and local logistics efficiently and in a climate-friendly manner. The pilot implementation of sustainable and cooperative wood transport strategies for critical forestry problem regions such as North-Carinthia in close cooperation with Waldverband Kärnten and RCA Key Account Management Carinthia enables evidence-based transfer to other rural axis areas and regions with low population density throughout Austria (e.g., East-Tyrol, Waldviertel, Mühlviertel). The consortium consisting of BOKU, PLUS, MOLA and RCA forms an ideal interdisciplinary combination contributing significantly to achieve climate targets through the implementation of newly developed, cross-organizational cooperation and business models for sustainable freight mobility, joint use and bundling of resources within and along the wood supply chain. The research approach enables a new generation of multimodal wood supply chain models through the development of agent-, event- and geographic information system-based large-scale simulation models for training a neural network using machine learning. By exploiting the semantic dimension, the explainable GeoAI model can be transferred to other regions as well as to other application contexts (e.g., multimodal and intermodal commodity, food and agricultural supply chains), enabling the development of inter-municipal-operator and inter-company cooperation models along regional supply chains. The advanced digital modelling toolbox and in particular the web-based mobility-shift-demonstrator support local stakeholders in the step-by-step implementation of horizontal and vertical cooperation potentials in wood transport through analyses and visualizations of CO2 savings, rail terminal locations and resource bottlenecks. The research project represents enormous potential for contingency planning as well as risk and crisis management and significantly improves the efficiency, resilience and sustainability of regional wood supply chain management through the web-based mobility transition demonstrator for quantitative decision support. Qualitative components for the extensive involvement of local stakeholders by means of interviews, surveys, case studies and participative workshops complete the holistic research approach and enable the evaluation of critical disablers and enablers as well as the targeted strategy development for the derivation of concrete business models and implementation steps and actions to force a mobility shift in wood transport as a mitigation and adaptation measure for climate and environmental protection.

The building materials industry faces major challenges in terms of the energy, emissions and resource savings required to achieve the climate targets. Measures to replace fossil fuels in the resource- and energy-intensive construction sector are not enough to achieve comprehensive decarbonisation. The long-term material use of wood in buildings is a building block for achieving climate neutrality in the building sector and it has been shown that timber construction can be a measure to mitigate climate change. An increase from the current 22% to 50% wood (residential) construction (Wood Construction Share) would require an additional wood input into the construction industry of 0.5 million m3 or up to 1 million m3 per year in a scenario with high wood utilisation in order to cover the increasing demand if no measures are taken to extend the service life of buildings and increase recycling. At the same time, the amount of waste wood from deconstruction will increase in the coming decades and therefore represents a growing potential for reuse and recycling from 2050 onwards if various technical, economic and regulatory obstacles can be overcome. Current political strategies and measures in terms of climate protection reinforce the need for innovations along the entire product life cycle and the value chain in the construction sector in order to realise the potential of the recyclability of construction products. Specifically

Smooth processes in supply chains (SCs) are essential. An analogue or digital disruption leads to delays in production, storage and/or transport. The resulting bottlenecks can jeopardise the entire provision of services to the population. Organisations as well as authorities are accordingly dependent on goods, energy or services reaching the population within a certain time. In order to (1) make the process flow from order to delivery more transparent, (2) minimise expenses and (3) be able to react more efficiently and resiliently to market fluctuations, SC participants are increasingly offering their services in the digital space. However, the basic structure of SCs is not designed to survive in this highly networked, digital environment without sufficient protection. Repeatedly, attacks are perpetrated on the IT of supply chains, causing them to be severely disrupted or even completely blocked. One of the most well-known cases, called ShadowPad, from 2017 shows that attacks on SCs are undoubtedly among the most dangerous modern attack vectors. The Sophie project aims to increase the resilience of value chains and their infrastructures and actors and addresses the following questions: 1) Mapping of specific components of relevant SCs taking into account digital influencing factors. 2) Simulation of digital attack vectors on SCs and their processes with regard to specific infrastructure areas; modelling of location problems and implementation of solution algorithms in order to evaluate potential supply locations with regard to their suitability for ensuring the optimal supply of all users in the event of a crisis. 3) Analysis of cascade effects and feedback processes with regard to critical infrastructures and supply-relevant organisations as striking use cases. 4) Validation and conception of general awareness trainings for key personnel in specific critical infrastructure areas. 5) Expanding the focus of the digital space to include cyber-physical systems (CPS) - analysing the potential impact of a digital crisis on society.