Forest equipment planning and availability depend on forest management and harvesting regimes in addition to the market demand. This project aims to support the equipment planning process by estimating the future need of forest equipment with different forest management options. The number of required machineries depends on how much feedstock is available. It also depends on how much biomass was processed by previous machines in the system. The number of products that the machine in question has to process varies based on the supply chain structure.
The aim of this study is to compare results between spreadsheet software and simple dynamic simulation model, built with AnyLogic, that are developed to estimate the future forest machinery need in forest equipment planning.
Forest equipment planning simulation model is kept simple and advanced capabilities such as GIS or inclusion of databases are left out for future development in this analysis. This is to ensure that the core design of the model worked as indented and to make validation easier. However, this limits the possibility to use a road network for real distances or to supply availability distributions from databases.