Despite significant achievements in the field of engineering, technology, organization and management of production, the logging and woodworking industry still lags behind the advanced industries in terms of its technical level, organization and efficiency. These circumstances pose a number of complex and important challenges for specialists in the design and calculation of new production systems, organization of their operation, and mastering the skills to manage them, taking into account the specific features of woodworking production.
Almost all branches of the logging and woodworking industries are discrete production types by their characteristics. There are many products of the same type. The main defining parameters of the manufactured products are discrete in nature. General-purpose processing equipment is widely used. A characteristic feature of such discrete production is, first and foremost, the complexity of analyzing its performance indicators. In addition, such production is difficult to organize and manage.
The specialization of production, which is typical for modern woodworking enterprises, makes it possible to use technological processes of mass and batch production on a large scale. The main technical and economic characteristics of technological processes of mass and batch production are productivity, economic efficiency, and reliability. Since increasing productivity and economic efficiency is one of the main tasks of designing new and modernizing old technological processes and production systems, the proposed engineering and economic solutions should be aimed at fulfilling these urgent tasks. Accordingly, and for the sake of the interests of the entire society, the woodworking industry faces the following large and important tasks
- Increasing labor productivity and economic efficiency of production by increasing the level of automation, rationalizing equipment and technological processes, and introducing new forms of production organization and management;
- optimization of technological processes to achieve the highest efficiency;
- introduction of flexible automated production based on the use of robotic devices and computers;
- optimization of organization and management at different levels of production on the basis of modern economic and mathematical methods and computer tools.
The peculiarity of these tasks is the need for accelerated development of the fundamental branch of science for woodworking – technology, economics and management based on technical cybernetics, computer technology, and extensive mathematization of applied knowledge.
Every woodworking process requires a certain amount of time, energy, raw materials and other components necessary for the process to go smoothly. To ensure that the process is carried out in a targeted, technology-driven manner, relevant information is also required. As a result of the interaction of material, energy and information components of the technological process within the framework of the overall technological scheme, the final product is obtained at the output of the process, which has certain information characteristics about its properties.
In the real conditions of woodworking production, it is impossible to localize the above-mentioned components of the technological process – material, energy and information – in space. Raw materials, for example, are used in the technological process as the basis of the material component. But the same raw material also carries information about its properties, certain process requirements, and the characteristics of future products. Similarly, the control system can perform joint functions with the energy conversion system.
In the analyzed structure, information is the most meaningful and, at the same time, the most flexible component of the technological process. It includes all the initial information (about raw materials, modes, required parameters and characteristics of the final product), working or operational information (about the current values of controlled and managed parameters) and control information, which is used to keep the process in a given mode.
The most conservative and practically uncontrollable in terms of targeted changes in properties is the material component. Therefore, all management in the structure of information should be aimed at the fullest use of the available material component within the framework of a given technology. However, highly efficient organization and management are possible only if the physical, mechanical, thermal, chemical and technological foundations of work processes are comprehensively studied.
A characteristic feature of wood processing processes is that the object of processing itself belongs to biological objects that have their own history of development.