1 Asac 2004

The challenges facing companies of the forest products industry are diverse and can be approached from many view points. How can these companies adapt to a changing environment and an increased need to improve their bottom line? Can new information technologies (IT) be adapted to this particular industry to allow it to flourish in the future? This paper will first focus on the particularities and trends of the forest products industry and the supply chain planning solutions offered by software companies for use in this industry. We highlight certain tendencies that can be found with these software companies and examine more deeply the different applications offered dedicated to the forest products industry. Next we discuss some of the potential roles of the so called multi-agent technology to complement the traditional optimization supply chain and manufacturing planning tools. Lastly we present a multi-agent experimental planning platform which aims at providing a flexible solution to integrate advanced planning tools throughout the supply chain into a collaborative planning system.