Agent-based supply-chain planning in the forest products industry

The new economic challenges and recent trends in globalization have made it very difficult for Canadian forest product companies to improve their financial position without the coordinated involvement of the entire company, including their supply chains (distributed facilities, company offices, industrial customers, and distributors). Such a new level of efficiency involves their distributed facilities and offices spread around the world, and their customers. One consequence of this new reality is that forest products companies are now facing the need to re-engineer their organizational processes and business practices with their partners. To do this they must adopt new technologies to support the coordination of their planning and control efforts in a customer-centered environment. This paper first proposes a generic software architecture for development of an experimentation environment to design and test distributed advanced planning and scheduling systems. This architecture enables combination of agent-based technology and operations research-based tools in order to first take advantage of the ability of agent technology to integrate distributed decision problems, and, second, to take advantage of the ability of operations research to develop and exploit specific normative decision models. Next, this paper describes how this architecture has been configured into an advanced planning and scheduling tool for the lumber industry. Finally, we present how an application of this advanced planning tool is currently being validated and tested in a real manufacturing setting.