Over 30 years of cut-to-length harvesting machines experience have demonstrated their effectiveness to logging companies in the countries of the boreal forest zone; i.e. better labour conditions in terms of ergonomics and safety, and less environmental damage and reliability in combination with convenient operation and maintenance. The introduction of fully mechanized cut-to-length technology in Russia shows a number of challenges that reduces cut-to-length effectiveness. These include a lower productivity of harvester-forwarder chains and higher roundwood losses in comparison with the Nordic countries due to a number of objective and subjective reasons (service, training, forest management, motivation, etc). Wood harvesting machinery has developted in the Nordic countries in recent years. The major changes were in integrating the harvesting of logging residues and stumps into the traditional system. Future prospects of cut-to-length technology require the development of forest logistics and forest bioenergy, and better environmental compatibility of wheeled vehicles with forest loam and clay soils.

This paper describes an approach to the optimal planning of wood harvesting and timber supply for forest companies of Russia. Software and tools successfully used in other countries (e.g., Finland, Sweden, Canada, etc.) are not as effective in Russian conditions for a number of reasons. This calls for the development of an original approach to solve this problem with respect to Russia’s specific conditions. The main factors affecting the operation of wood harvesting companies in Russia were determined. The optimization problem was formulated taking into account all important features of wood harvesting specific to the country. The mathematical model of the problem was formulated and analyzed. An important requirement is that the solution algorithm should find high-quality plans within short computation times. The original problem was reduced to a block linear programming problem of large dimension, for which an effective numerical solution method was proposed. It is based on the multiplicative simplex method with column generation within Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition and uses heuristics to determine feasible solutions based on the branch and bound method. We tested the solution approach on real production data from a forest company in southern Karelia with a planning horizon up to a year. This case study involved 198 sites and 14 machines harvesting up to 200,000 cubic meters from an available stock volume of about 300,000 cubic meters. An increase in profit by 5% to 10% was observed, measured as revenue from the sale of products, net of harvesting and transportation costs.

Harvesters and forwarders are the main part of cut-to-length logging system equipment. The perfection of the hydraulic cranes has a very large impact on the overall operating efficiency of these forest machines. The impact of the crane partial automation on the operator’s work cycle and workload is described in this article. Two machines were studied in field conditions. Differences in the frequency and duration of telescopic extension boom control activations were identified. It was determined that, as a result of automation, one of the degrees of freedom of the crane controls is almost completely excluded from use in the case of the forwarder. A significant reduction in the duration of its use is observed in the case of the harvester. As a result, this saves the psycho-physiological resources of the operator for more efficient use of the remaining degrees of freedom, which, coupled with a simpler and more intuitive logic of the controls operation, improves the productivity, accuracy and safety of cut-to-length logging. In addition, a simpler work algorithm reduces the level of stereotyping of the operator’s actions, fatigue and loss of attention, which usually emerge at the end of the shift. This work was supported by the Russian Federation Ministry of Science and Higher Education (state research target, theme no. 075-03-2023-128).