Cooperative multiobjective decision support for the paper industry

We built and deployed a decision-support system for scheduling paper manufa cturing and distribution, an extremely complex task with multiple stages of production and strong interaction between stages. In contrast to earlier a pproaches, our system considers multiple scheduling objectives and multiple stages of production and distribution simultaneously using multiple evalua tion criteria. Our system functions as an intelligent assistant to the sche dulers and generates multiple good scheduling alternatives using a portfoli o of algorithms and direct human-expert input. The successful deployment of our system at several paper mills in North America has resulted in signifi cant savings, greater customer satisfaction, and improved business processe s.