Integrated production planning and route scheduling in pulp mill industry

In this paper, we consider the complete supply chain for a large pulp producer in Sweden. The supply chain is divided into two parts, the pulp production planning problem and the distribution-to-customers problem. We focus on the overall problem and the interaction between the partial problems, and discuss how to solve these simultaneously in a supply-chain logistic support system. We have modeled the partial problems as mixed integer optimization models and use specialized solution methods for each problem. The models become large-scaled when we consider a realistic time horizon. We therefore use flexible ways to aggregate time periods to find good solutions within reasonable time limits.