Agent-Based Supply Chain Planning in the Forest Products Industry

Due to new economical challenges and recent trends regarding international trade and globalization, many companies from the Canadian forest products industry are now facing the need to reengineer their organizational processes and business practices with their partners. This paper proposes an architecture which aims to enable the development of advanced planning systems for the forest products industry. This architecture combines agent technology with operational research, in order to take advantage of the ability of agent-based technology to integrate distributed decision problems, and the ability of operation research to solve complex decision problems This paper describes how this architecture has been configured into an advanced planning and scheduling tool for the lumber industry, and how it is being validated.