A hybrid collaborative algorithm to solve an integrated wood transportation and paper pulp production problem

Abstract

This paper proposes a hybrid algorithm to tackle a real-world problem arising in the context of pulp and paper production. This situation is modelled as a production problem where one has to decide which wood will be used by each available processing unit (wood cooker) in order to minimize the variance of wood densities within each cooker for each period of the planning horizon. The proposed hybrid algorithm is built around two distinct phases. The first phase uses two interacting heuristic methods to identify a promising reduced search space, which is then thoroughly explored in the second phase. This hybrid algorithm produces high-quality solutions in reasonable computation times, especially for the largest test instances. Extensive computational experiments demonstrated the robustness and efficiency of the method.

Keywords:

• linear programming
• hybrid algorithms
• variance minimization
• heuristics
• paper pulp production

Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by grants [OPG 0293307 and OPG 0177174] from the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and grant [2671/04-2] from Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)—Brazil. Their support is gratefully acknowledged.