Abstract

Wood is the renewable, flexible, and regional resource of our time contributing strongly to a sustainable development. Climate crisis induced abiotic natural disasters such as windstorms followed by biotic forest calamities in form of insect and fungi infestations threaten forest ecosystem services challenging the management of surrounding socio-economic systems. Resilient and sustainable logistical processes are essential for coping with the increasing frequency and severity of risks to secure green supplies for increasing production demands of wood products. Simulation methods offer beneficial approaches to consider those risks as well as resulting bottlenecks, interacting queues, and waiting times. Discrete event simulation provides an excellent methodology for a digital representation of wood supply chains focusing on straightforward business processes. Consequently, unique models for unimodal, multi-modal, and multi-echelon unimodal wood transport are presented, which enable multicriteria-based transport strategy development, optimal fleet configurations, and wood quality preservation in challenging scenarios. The presented models were applied in scientific, educational, and managerial settings and set the stage for knowledge transfer in serious-game-based workshops, advanced risk management, and contingency planning.