Big Data analytics for the forest industry : A proof-of-conceptbuilt on cloud technologies

Sammanfattning: Large amounts of data in various forms are generated at a fast pace in today´s society. This is commonly referred to as “Big Data”. Making use of Big Data has been increasingly important for both business and in research. The forest industry is generating big amounts of data during the different processes of forest harvesting. In Sweden, forest infor-mation is sent to SDC, the information hub for the Swedish forest industry. In 2014, SDC received reports on 75.5 million m3fub from harvester and forwarder machines. These machines use a global stand-ard called StanForD 2010 for communication and to create reports about harvested stems. The arrival of scalable cloud technologies that com-bines Big Data with machine learning makes it interesting to develop an application to analyze the large amounts of data produced by the forest industry. In this study, a proof-of-concept has been implemented to be able to analyze harvest production reports from the StanForD 2010 standard. The system consist of a back-end and front-end application and is built using cloud technologies such as Apache Spark and Ha-doop. System tests have proven that the concept is able to successfully handle storage, processing and machine learning on gigabytes of HPR files. It is capable of extracting information from raw HPR data into datasets and support a machine learning pipeline with pre-processing and K-Means clustering. The proof-of-concept has provided a code base for further development of a system that could be used to find valuable knowledge for the forest industry.