Dispatching a fishing trawler fleet in the Canadian Atlantic groundfish industry

An integrated fish-processing firm in the Canadian Atlantic demersal fishery usually owns a fleet of fishing trawlers. For a given planning horizon, the firm must find a minimum-cost fleet dispatching plan in order to satisfy demands for various species at its processing plants. In this paper, the authors formulate two cases of this trawler dispatch problem as mixed-integer programming models. In addition, they develop heuristics for solving both problems. Results for several sample problems, show quite favorable performance by the heuristic methods. Solution quality averaged within 2% of Lagrangean lower bounds. Also, using three test problems extracted from a firm’s historical fishing records, the authors produce in a deterministic setting, solutions which represent up to 30% improvement over the firm’s real-time solutions.