Advanced planning in vertically integrated wine supply chains

Abstract

This chapter gives detailed insights into a project for transitioning a wine manufacturing company from a mostly spreadsheet driven business with isolated silo-operated planning units into one that makes use of integrated and optimised decision making by use of modern heuristics. We present a piece of the puzzle - the modelling of business entities and their silo operations and optimizations, and pave the path for a further holistic integration to obtain company-wide globally optimised decisions. We argue that the use of Computational Intelligence methods is essential to cater for dynamic, time-variant and non-linear constraints and solve today's real-world problems exemplified by the given wine supply chain. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.