Decision support for efficient and environmentally friendly sea transport of fish feed in the aquaculture industry.

The project will improve efficiency and environmental friendliness in aquaculture logistics through the development of an intelligent and data-driven decision support system for fish food distribution planning.

The aquaculture industry is considered one of the most important industries for Norway in the future. To achieve these ambitions, however, one depends on the professionalization of the industry. Despite the fact that the industry is growing and at the same time consolidating against larger players with larger logistics systems, there are very good planning tools available to handle the increasing complexity.

The project will contribute to this professionalization through the development of a new intelligent decision support system (Anteo) and new and improved work processes for planning of food distribution (BioMar and Mowi).

Logistics planners have to consider a large number of parameters that set guidelines for the planning and implementation of fish feed transport at sea: A feed supplier will typically be able to produce five hundred types of feed distributed among several different factories, to be delivered to a hundred farms via a flat consisting of five to ten ships. Determining the distribution plans thus becomes a complex combinatorial problem, and it is virtually impossible for a planner to take over all Possibilities as the planning problem presents. The planner also has to deal with all Challenges and discrepancies that arise, such as responding to cases of illness that require special types of food at unforeseen times, changes in food requirements due to seasonal variations and order cancellations, delays in distribution due to seasonal weather conditions, as well as technical problems on ships leading to reduced transport capacity.

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The decision support system will give logistics planners an increased ability to deal with operational challenges and discrepancies, thus giving them better capacity to focus on planning optimal sailing routes. By integrating intelligent algorithms and operational analysis in a digital decision support system, also realises the potential for optimal feed distribution compared to current manual scheduling practices. This will contribute to the improvement of key KPIs such as increased utilisation of vessel and surface capacity, reduced energy consumption due to shorter sailing distances and more reliable deliveries. The digital transformation will also facilitate the introduction of service-based contract forms that meet future interaction needs in the value chain in order to realize cost-effective and Environmentally friendly distribution.

DETERMINED will develop an entirely new product to be integrated into Anteo's software platform and demonstrated through use in BioMar and Mowi its planning of fish feed distribution. The project consortium has been assembled to cover the most central parts of the value chain related to the production, distribution and consumption of fish food. Anteo as a developer and provider of software, BioMar as a food producer, and Mowi as a fully integrated company and thereby both producer and consumer. In addition, the world-leading research community in operations analysis, planning and maritime domain knowledge is represented by SINTEF Ocean and NTNU.