Supply chain optimization in the pulp mill industry – integer programming models, column generation and novel constraint branches

We study the supply chain problem of a large international pulp producer with five pulp mills located in Scandinavia. The company currently uses manual planning for most of its supply chain, which includes harvesting and transportation of pulp, production scheduling and distribution of products to customers. We have developed two new mixed integer models that determine daily supply chain decisions over a planning horizon of three months. One model is based on column generation, where the generation phase is to find new production plans using a shortest path network. The second, slightly less flexible, has the daily production decisions explicitly included in the model. In order to solve the models within practical time limits we use a flexible approach that aggregates together the less immediate decisions. We also introduce a novel constraint branching heuristic. The models and solution approaches are intended to become an integrated component in the company's new management system. In tests and comparisons with today's manual planning, we have found new strategic policies that significantly reduce the company's supply chain costs.