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

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

The aquaculture industry is predicted to be one of the most important industries for Norway in the future. To achieve these ambitions, however, one depends on a professionalisation of the industry. Despite the fact that the industry is growing and at the same time consolidating towards larger players with a larger logistics system, there are very few planning tools available to deal with the increasing complexity.

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

Logistics planners must consider a large number of parameters that set guidelines for planning and carrying out fish feed transport at sea: A feed supplier will typically be able to produce five hundred types of feed distributed in several different factories, which will be delivered to one hundred farms via a fleet of five to ten vessels. Determining the distribution plans thus becomes a complex combinatorial problem, and it is almost impossible for a planner to take over all the possibilities that the planning problem offers. The planner must also address all challenges and discrepancies that arise, such as responding to illnesses that require special feed types at unforeseen times, changes in feed requirements due to seasonal variations and order cancellations, delays in distribution due to poor weather conditions, and technical problems on ships such as leads to reduced transport capacity.

The decision support system will give logistics planners increased ability to handle operational challenges and deviations, and thus give them better capacity to focus on planning optimal sailing routes. By integrating intelligent algorithms and operations analysis into a digital decision support system, the potential for optimal feed distribution compared to current manual planning practices is also realized. This will contribute to the improvement of key KPIs such as increased utilization of vessel and fleet 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 the future interaction needs in the value chain in order to realize cost-effective and environmentally friendly feed distribution.

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