A two-stage procedure for planning marketing and fishing activities in fish-processing firms

Planning the activities of fish-processing firms takes place against a backdrop of significant uncertainty. Demand patterns, fish supply, harvesting rates, fish quality, and more, are all uncertain planning parameters. This paper presents a two-stage decision framework for assisting the planning of harvesting and marketing activities in integrated fish-processing firms. These firms operate under an enterprise allocation scheme which gives them quasi-property rights to specified quantities of fish in the sea. The first stage of the decision methodology addresses the aggregate use of the firm's resources and enterprise allocations over a 1 year planning horizon. The objective is to maximize potential net profit to the firm. First-stage decisions are subsequently used to set the parameters and boundaries for the second decision stage which deals with the dispatching of the firm's fishing fleet. The fleet must be dispatched in a manner which allows the actualization of first-stage decisions at minimum cost. Information obtained from the second stage is used to modify the first-stage decisions if necessary. Using a combination of real and fabricated data, we demonstrate how the framework would be implemented for a typical firm in the Canadian Atlantic groundfish industry.