Planning harvesting and marketing activities for integrated fishing firms under an enterprise allocation scheme

This paper focuses on the tactical planning problem for integrated fishing enterprises operating in Canada’s Atlantic Groundfish industry. A firm with a fleet of trawlers, a number of processing plants, quasi-property rights to fish in the sea, and market requirements, must coordinate harvesting and marketing strategies which will allow it to maximize potential revenue. To achive this, the authors outline a large-scale linear programming model which maximizes net revenue from product sales less fleet operating costs, subject to marketing and fleet operating constraints. The output of the multi-period linear program suggest what products and their respective volumes should be marketed, and how raw fish should be caught in order to satisfy marketing requirements. The authors demonstrate the planning and diagnostic potential of the linear program by solving an example problem based on data obtained from a large Atlantic seafood company.