Development of a catch allocation tool design for production planning at JS McMillan Fisheries

JS McMillan Fisheries Ltd. (JSM) is a Vancouver-based commercial fishing, production and distribution company. As the operations of JSM evolved, the process of allocating a commercial salmon catch to a set of final products has become complex and time-consuming. We developed a linear programming based decision support tool to assist JSM management with this allocation decision. The decision support tool yields a production plan that maximizes the profit potential of the catch and allows management to carry out “what if” analyses. Moreover, this paper explores implementation issues such as modeling fish quality deterioration, measuring the effect of by-product and addressing catch-size uncertainty.