Evaluating costs on wood supply chain for supporting Slovenian and Italian forest cooperation

The purpose of the work was to analyse costs of the wood supply chain inside an area lying over borders between Italy and Slovenia. Two SDSS models, developed by University of Padova and by University of Ljubljana, were used to define cutting and skidding systems and their costs. The models consider different list of systems and different algorithms or parameters, but comparing results on the same area (Slovenia) forest utilization costs differ by only 0.8 €. After making cost averages and cumulating allowable cutting wood at road side, transportation costs were evaluated by networking analysis. Two scenarios (with and without boundaries between states) were studied and results show that wood could flow easily from Slovenia to Italy because of lower utilization costs, but also Italian wood could flow to Slovenia if it is far from terminals more than 30 km. Transportation costs are about 30% of total costs, so it would be possible to reduce total costs by introducing new technologies or raising cutting amount in forest compartments with productive function.