Using Conjoint Analyses to Improve Cable Yarder Design Characteristics: An Austrian Yarder Case Study to Advance Cost-Effective Extraction

Abstract

Steep country harvesting has been identified as the main bottleneck to achieving greater profitability in the forestry sector of New Zealand and Australia. An improvement of efficiency, work safety and environmental sustainability should be realized by developing an advanced steep terrain timber harvesting system based on innovative Austrian technology. To identify the best suitable configuration of a cable yarder for steep terrain harvesting, user preferences based on an online survey (conjoint analysis) have been evaluated to answer the following questions: (1) What attributes of a new yarder design are most important to consumers? (2) Which criteria do stakeholders consider when selecting a cable yarder? (3) What are the weights representing the relative importance of criteria? Using eight specific design scenarios a fourth question, being which cable yarder concept is the best, was also answered. This case study shows that conjoint analyses is an effective tool to assess, rate and subsequently integrate design characteristics. Based on the results of the analysis, a cable yarder prototype will be manufactured in Austria and transferred to New Zealand for testing and demonstration.

Productivity, fuel consumption and cost in whole tree cable yarding: conventional diesel carriage versus electrical energy-recuperating carriage

“…Recuperation technology was introduced as early as 1900 in railway systems and later in automotive systems (Reif et al 2012). Recently, this technology has also been introduced to cable yarding, both to the base machine (Kühmaier et al 2019a) and to carriages, if the latter are motorized. In the case of carriages, energy can be recuperated during lateral yarding, carriage travel or unloading.…”

Determining the relative importance of factors affecting the success of innovations in forest technology using AHP

“…Nevertheless, a further detailed analysis is required to better understand how to improve decision making by FMM companies. For example, instead of using general factors—which are used to measure the success of any technology innovations—future work should be oriented in defining weights of factors, which are related to more specific forest technology product (Kühmaier et al, ).…”

“…For example, instead of using general factors-which are used to measure the success of any technology innovations-future work should be oriented in defining weights of factors, which are related to more specific forest technology product (Kühmaier et al, 2019).…”

“…There are several explicit methods (Pöyhönen & Hämäläinen, ; Zheng & Lienert, ) for deriving weights from preference statements, the most common being direct point allocation, simple multiattribute rating technique (Edwards, ; von Winterfeldt & Edwards, ), analytic hierarchy process (AHP; Saaty, ), trade‐off (Keeney & Raiffa, ), and swing (von Winterfeldt & Edwards, ). An alternative to previously explicit methods is to use conjoint analysis (Green & Rao, )—implicit method for deriving weights of criteria which has already been used in decision‐making problem related to forest technology (Kühmaier et al, ).…”

Technical Solutions of Forest Machine Hybridization

“…In the case when an external force acted on the winches, recuperation took place. The energy obtained was stored in the supercapacitors [20]. The energy obtained was used again under high load conditions of the internal combustion engine of the machine, the same as the C860 hybrid wood chipper from Kesla Oyj.…”