Advanced planning tools for collaborative operations planning in the forest products industry

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The Canadian forest products industry, especially in the value-added production sector such as the furniture industry or the prefabricated house industry, is composed of many organizations, independent or integrated, working together to manufacture and distribute their products to their customers. Along with the increasing presence of the Chinese industry in the North American market, these organizations must develop new approaches to work together to be more efficient and effective to satisfy their customers. In order to achieve this goal, an important issue that must be solved concerns how these organizations jointly plan and coordinate their mutual operations to respond quickly and accurately to market needs and eliminate all wastes (i.e., time and inventory) that affect their performance. The objective of this research program is to exploit recent advances in distributed decision making and supply chain management and agent-based supply chain management in order to (1) propose novel collaborative operations planning models, with a focus on the two-echelon multi-level capacited lot-sizing problem, to allow local organizations become more competitive; and (2) Analyze the impact of such collaborative practices on the performance of these organizations with regard to various contexts of supply, manufacturing, and demand.