Collaborative Railway Transportation Strategy to Increasing Imports of Russian Wood for the Finnish Forest Energy Industry

In this research, the logistics alternatives of Finnish forest industry under increasing imports of Russian wood are discussed. The paper show that the transportation strategy of a third party logistic provider (3PLs) used in the railway has large implications for the logistics of imported wood from Russia. In the primary data used in this research, the basic scenario described the railway transportation strategy of 3PLs at 2011, before Russia’s World Trade Organization (WTO) membership. The alternative scenarios described the strategies of 3PLs for changed wood transportation and storing needs of imported Russian wood under WTO. In the alternative scenarios also the railway wagon rotation was adjusted to reach the global optimum strategy for more efficient logistics of plants. After adjusting merely 3PLs’ wagon traffic flow, the global optimum was not reached, since the reduction of empty wagons caused severe shortages of wood flow and later a need to cut down storage inventory at districts and plants increasing total logistics costs. As the conclusion, the model based on the dynamic multiple objective linear programming (DMOLP) is recommended to the supply chain parties, as the adaptation of Russian wood import to the global railway transportation environment would require collaborative logistics and integrated optimizations of wood and the wagon-traffic flows to be carried out.