Forest fires caused by forest machines

Forestry is one of Sweden's biggest and most important industries. With all the positives forestry brings, it also has some negative impact on the environment, where risk of forest fires is one. The large amount of fires caused by humanity has a big negative impact on nature and wildlife, but also a financial effect on the forest industry, forest owners, as well as te society as a whole.

A lot of today's focus on forest fires lies on finding solutions for how to handle already established forest fires. An established forest fire is almost impossible to stop. The resources is instead focused on reducing the pace of the spread while waiting for rain. This scenario demands a lot from society, both financially, as well as resources from firefighting departments and much more.

The forestry manufacturing chain is affected by the increasingly common situation of dry weather periods. This causes big additional costs for the industry. During the summer of 2018, the industry had costs of over 102 000 hours of fire surveillance and 420 000 hours of machine downtime, only in Sweden.

This project explores the possibilities of how to prevent these fire catastrophes by identifying and eliminating the problem at an early stage. This concept is a proposal for how the industry could perform a safer and more reliable production by minimizing, if not totally eliminating, the risk of fires caused by forestry machines, while improving the production flow and simplifying the planning.