Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The goal of this research is to develop a set of processes, methods, and decision-support technologies, for agile operations management in divergent wood processing systems driven by customer demand. More specifically, we aim to achieve five objectives:1) To propose processes, algorithms, and decision-support tools allowing a management team in charge of procurement, production, and distribution, to collectively establish coordinated sales and operations plans (S&OP) for capturing market opportunities (the focus is on commodity products, at the tactical level).2) To develop a method to establish the optimal mix of products in the context of coproduction and divergent product flow (specialty products; tactical level).3) To create decision-support tools performing real-time planning/replanning for drying and finishing operations (specialty products; operational level).4) To develop a model predicting, in real time, the volume of each finished product that would be produced if a given log was processed at a specific plant (procurement; production; tactical and operational level).5) With an integrated vision, to design an operations management framework stating how to combine algorithms, humans, and decision processes in order to maximize the performance of the organization in a dynamic environment (procurement; production; sales; tactical and operational level).