Bruno Agard

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Polytechnique Montréal

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is an analytical technique that offers a real advantage over laboratory analysis in the food industry due to its low operating costs, rapid analysis, and non‐destructive sampling technique. Numerous studies have shown the relevance of NIR spectra analysis for assessing certain food properties with the right calibra...

In a collaborative supply chain arrangement like vendor‐managed inventory, information on product demand at the point of sale is expected to be shared among members of the supply chain. However, in practice, obtaining such information can be costly, and some members may be unwilling or unable to provide the necessary access to the data. As such, la...

Scalability is a challenge for Large Scale Optimization Problems (LSGO). Improving the scalability of efficient Differential Evolution algorithms (DE) has been a research focus due to their successful application to high-dimensional problems. Recently, a DE-based algorithm called LSMDE (Low-dimensional Space Modeling-based Differential Evolution) h...

In Industry 4.0 context, data valorisation allows industries to develop new capabilities, create competitive advantages and achieve manufacturing sustainability, but technological infrastructures are needed to support system interoperability and to manage datas. These infrastructures are not enought mature in many industrial environments, especiall...

Wheat tempering conditions grains before a milling process begins. Process adjustments must be made to reach a desired level of flour quality and yield, depending on multiple factors. This article aims to develop a decision support tool to help operators adjust the first‐stage tempering parameters. It is based on a regression model that predicts an...

To meet global food requirements while responding to the environmental challenges of the 21st century, an agri-environmental transition towards sustainable agricultural practices is necessary. Crop rotation is an ancestral practice and is a pillar of sustainable agriculture. However, this practice requires more organization on the part of producers...

In a context of growing demand for food and the scarcity of natural resources, the development of more sustainable agriculture is imperative. This means it is necessary to limit the environmental impact of agricultural activities on soil and water and to be mindful of the carbon footprint, while maintaining crop yields and economic benefits for pro...

The selection of an accurate performance metric is highly important to evaluate the quality of a forecasting method. This evaluation may help to select between different forecasting tools of forecasting outputs, and then support many decisions within a company. This paper proposes to evaluate the sensitivity and reliability of forecasts performance...

Smart card data offers an in-depth understanding of the travel behavior of public transport users. An efficient way to analyze public transport users is to group them into different clusters with similar behaviors. However, this clustering process should take into account space and time because both of these dimensions characterize daily trips. Dep...

In recent years, solutions based on Industry 4.0. technologies have become more and more accessible for SMEs. As a result, better data collection strategies are being developed and an increase in available data has been observed. Furthermore, SMEs contribute largely to the GDP in certain industrial sectors such as the food industry, food services a...

The tempering process is a key process in wheat flour milling that requires proper adjustments to achieve a desired level of flour quality and yield. The present study aims to develop a tool to predict the moisture content of organic wheat at the end of the first stage of tempering. A study case was conducted at a mill located in the Quebec region...

Anomaly detection is a topic studied in the literature for a large number of applications. As more and more data is collected continuously, numerous algorithms have been developed for anomaly detection in time series. In this paper, we first propose a method for time series anomaly detection that can be used in different fields. This method is then...

In an increasingly complex production environment, production scheduling is more critical than ever to ensure productivity and profitability. Generally treated as an optimization problem, production scheduling faces a gap between theory and practice, but tacit knowledge on the shopfloor can influence production sequencing and scheduling. Recurrent...

Recommender systems have widely been used in the past few years as a recipe to success in e-commerce. Already, 35 percent of what consumers purchase on Amazon and 75 percent of what they watch on Netflix come from product recommendation (MacKenzie et al. in How retailers can keep up with consumers. Technical report. McKinsey & Company, London, 2013...

Meeting an increasing demand for food while preserving the environment is one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. To meet this challenge, conservation agriculture can rely on the age-old practice of crop rotation. The objective of this article is to develop a methodology for predicting and visualizing crop rotations, supporting di...

Large-Scale Global Optimization (LSGO) has been an active research field. Part of this interest is supported by its application to cutting-edge research such as Deep Learning, Big Data, and complex real-world problems such as image encryption, real-time traffic management, and more. However, the high dimensionality makes solving LSGO a significant...

The milling of wheat flour is a process that has existed since ancient times. In the course of history, the techniques have improved, the equipment modernized. The interest of the miller in charge of the mill is still to ensure that a mill is functional and profitable, as well as to provide a consistent quality of flour. The production of organic f...

Smart card data from public transit systems has proven to be useful to understand the behaviors of public transit users. Relevant research has been done concerning: (1) the utilization of smart card data, (2) data mining techniques and (3) the utilization of data mining in smart card data. In prior research, the classification of user behavior has...

In recent years, recommender systems have become necessary in overcoming the challenges related to the incredible growth of information. They are used in a wide range of contexts and applications, mainly as prediction tools for customer interest, designed to help customers decide, compare, discover and explore products (Meyer in Recommender systems...

Agriculture and data science are gradually merging to promote sustainable agriculture: productive and environmentally conservative. Crop rotation is an agricultural practice with multiple environmental and economic benefits. It is frequently studied from an agronomic point of view however, crop rotation patterns are still poorly analyzed even thoug...

Under intermittent demand, demand time series can contain noise and have intermittent characteristics which render their modeling difficult. Models for producing forecasts in these conditions are optimized on errors that are calculated on out-of-sample forecasts of demand time series. This is insufficient in an intermittent demand context, as inter...

La prédiction du temps de vie résiduel-RUL (Remaining Useful Life) est un facteur clé de la maintenance prédictive. Ces prédictions étaient généralement basées sur une expertise métier et sur des procédés statistiques indépendants des conditions d'utilisation des machines en temps réel. Or avec la généralisation des concepts clés de l'Industrie 4.0...

Spatial information is becoming crucial for strategic decision making, but accessing and understanding this information is not easy. Dedicated tools can support the decision process in many ways, such as visualization interfaces or data analyses. Numerous Decision Support System (DSS) development methodologies exist along with dedicated Spatial Dec...

Motivation Multiple biological clocks govern a healthy pregnancy. These biological mechanisms produce immunologic, metabolomic, proteomic, genomic and microbiomic adaptations during the course of pregnancy. Modeling the chronology of these adaptations during full-term pregnancy provides the frameworks for future studies examining deviations implica...

Recommender systems focus on the various algorithms and techniques to get the most accurate prediction of users’ preferences. We propose a method designed to consider actual stock levels in the recommendation process in order to shift demand toward specific products for a specific user. The method is displayed in two phases; the first is a categori...

Strategic supply chain planning relies on accurate, long-range forecasts. Accurate forecasts, in turn, rely on the availability of suitable data and information from which a prediction can be made. In some domains, such as vendor managed inventory, product consumption data may not be available because of a lack of collaborative information. Deliver...

A classification of the behaviour of smart card users is important in the field of public transit demand analysis. It provides an understanding of people’s sequence of activities within a period of time. However, classical metrics such as Euclidean distance is not appropriate when dealing with time series classification. To solve this problem, in t...

Spatial data analysis allows for a better understanding of environmental effects on the performance of an organization’s activities. One of the first steps required to process such an analysis is to gather all of the spatialized data corresponding to the elements that might influence the activities. Then, a series of treatments must be processed on...

Optimization of the supply chain relates on data that describes actual or future situation. Besides in many situations available data may not correspond directly to what is expected for the different models because of too large quantity and imprecision of the data that may lead to suboptimal or even bad decisions. Actual problem considers the avail...

Strategic business planning requires forecasted information that contains a sufficient level of detail that reflects trends, seasonality, and changes while also minimizing the level of effort needed to develop and assess the forecasted information. The balance of information is most often achieved by grouping the customer population into segments;...

The lack of control over downstream assets can hinder universities' ability to extract rents from their inventive activities. We explore this possibility by assessing the relationship between invention generality and renewal decisions for a sample of Canadian nanotechnology patents. Our results show that general purpose inventions enjoy a longer le...

In many cities, worldwide public transit companies use smart card system to manage fare collection. Analysis of this acquisitive information provides a comprehensive insight of user's influence in the interactive public transit network. In this regard, analysis of temporal data, describing the time of entering to the public transit network is consi...

Airline companies are subject to a considerable amount of disruption during operation. It is vital for many industries to predict the source of disruption in different levels of management, in order to reduce the recovery cost. One of the most important and costly sources of disruption in the airline industry is the number of reserve pilots. We dev...

This paper deals with the difficult problem of joint product family and supply chain design. We present a general model that simultaneously considers the construction of the bill of materials and the design of the supply chain network. For the bill of materials, product, sub-assembly and component substitution possibilities are considered. For the...

Small and medium-size enterprise accidents constitute a large proportion of the occupational health and safety accidents recorded in the construction industry. The methods used to tackle occupational health and safety issues in large enterprises do not work most of the time in the small and medium sized enterprises. Therefore a way of tackling occu...

Demand forecasts are essential for managing supply chain activities but are difficult to create when collaborative information is absent. Many traditional and advanced forecasting tools are available, but applying them to a large number of customers is not manageable. In our research, we use data mining techniques to identify segments of customers...

Nowadays, tremendous data, are continuously gathering from the smart card in public transport domain. Such data, conveying two viable distinct information, can ensue designing intelligent transportation. More specifically, users behavior in a public transport system, can be investigated, as one of the data mining and machine learning applications....

In the aim of minimizing time wasting and tedious tasks in spatial analysis tools development, this paper introduces a methodology and a framework. The five steps methodology is composed of data gathering, data management, analysis model development, user interface development and tools validation. The framework, based on client-server architecture...

This article explores whether the relationship between the breath of technological integration (recombination distance) and the breath of an invention׳s subsequent application (basicness) is moderated by the sector of activity (private or public), science-linkage strength and industry characteristics. Our analysis of Canadian nanotechnology patents...

An influential factor affecting the efficiency of a manufacturing facility is its layout. In a production facility, measure for efficiency can be based on the total cost of transporting the items between different departments and throughout the facility. However, other factors may influence efficiency of the manufacturing facility too. As such are:...

Facility layout design has an important effect on the performance of manufacturing systems. It intends to determine relative location of departments and machines within a plant. A good layout design must ensure that a set of criteria and objectives are met and optimised, e.g. area requirements, cost, communication and safety. The most common object...

Environmental concerns are increasingly taken into account by companies, owing to the significant legal and consumer issues being raised today. This paper considers the environmental constraints inherent in the design of a product family and its supply chain. Mathematical models are proposed for optimizing costs in the face of carbon emissions rest...

There are numerous hazards to be found in almost any workplace. Annually, millions of workers die, are injured or become ill as a result of these occupational hazards. Industrial machines are often involved in these occupational accidents. Because of the demands of regulatory compliance, and the potentially high cost in terms of human suffering and...

More and more companies are designing product families with the aim of offering a wider variety of products and at the same time reducing product cost by standardizing components and processes, making mass customization a reality. This paper proposes a comprehensive methodology to form product families taking advantage of the ability of the fuzzy l...

This paper proposes a method for finding a robust solution to the problem of joint product family and supply chain design. Optimizing product design and the supply chain network at the same time brings substantial benefits. However, this approach involves decisions that can generate uncertainties in the long term. The challenge is to come up with a...

This is the second part of a two-part survey of optimization models and solution algorithms for emergency response planning in electric distribution systems. The first part of the survey addresses reliability planning problems with fault considerations related to electric distribution operations. The aim of this second part is to provide a comprehe...

Emergency response operations in electric distribution systems involve a host of decision-making problems at the reliability, performance monitoring and evaluation, and contingency planning levels. Those operations include fault diagnosis, fault location, fault isolation, restoration, and repair. As the first of a two-part survey, this paper review...

Facility planning considers the design, layout, location and accommodation of people, machines and activities of a system or enterprise within a physical environment. Appropriate decisions on facility layout, concerning the spatial allocation of departments and equipment (e.g. machines) and the required connections among them, can organize the prod...

Knowledge management from a strategic planning point of view often requires having an accurate understanding of a firm’s or a nation’s competences in a given technological discipline. Knowledge maps have been used for the purpose of discovering the location, ownership and value of intellectual assets. The purpose of this article is to develop a new...

The purpose of this article is to help managers early in the design of new product families. Based on product structures, sales forecasts, and constraints imposed by the marketplace, like quality and cost, the proposed method selects the product modules that meet customer requirements for the products, while respecting those constraints. The propos...

Discovering and assessing fields of expertise in emerging technologies from patent data is not straightforward. First, patent classification in an emerging technology being far from complete, the definitions of the various applications of its inventions are embedded within communities of practice. Because patents must contain full record of prior a...

Knowledge management from a strategic planning point of view often requires having an accurate understanding of a firm's or a nation's competences in a given technological discipline. Knowledge maps have been used for the purpose of discovering the location, ownership and value of intellectual assets. The purpose of this article is to develop a new...

The layout planning of facilities constitutes an important issue to be faced by a company. While the main concern with the facilities layout planning is to reduce the cost of material handling, the layout of a facility plays a major role in the safety and productivity of operations. Many approaches have been presented for planning facilities layout...

Over the past few years, a number of key issues related to the product family design have been addressed, and a great deal of work has been done to improve it. Many different tools have been employed in this effort, such as mass customization, modularity, delayed differentiation, commonality, platforms, product families, and so on. The purpose of t...

Facilities layout planning is fast becoming the compliance for the organizations. In the past two decades, researchers have developed simulation and mathematical programming models to estimate the performance measures of a production system. However, the considerations of occupational health and safety management have been overlooked. The objective...

The choice of an appropriate end-of-life (EOL) destination for discarded products is becoming an important issue for most manufactured products, given the current problems of environmental waste impact and landfill saturation. To address these issues, the design of a product must be optimised with a view to incorporating in that product an environm...

The purpose of this article is to help managers in early design of new product families. The proposal includes a single level module design formulation that considers quality and cost simultaneously. The method for testing the proposed algorithm is based on a case study of an electro-mechanical assembly device. The performance of the algorithm is c...

This paper deals with two major issues for industries; the product design and the supply chain design. These problems are usually solved separately, but in recent years, approaches were proposed to tackle these two problems together. In this paper, we investigate more precisely the links between the standardization of products or components, and th...

Road collisions lead to great human and financial costs for society. Although some progress has been made, this worldwide issue needs more attention, as the costs increase. Proactive methods for road safety analysis that do not depend on collision occurrences are needed. Collection and analysis of microscopic data (road user trajectories) about all...

Customer satisfaction depends on many variables, such as quality, price, availability, customer service, and so on, and increases with the degree to which the delivered product meets the customer's preferences. Frequently, vendors have to help customers select a product from among those available to satisfy their needs and wants. Most of the time,...

Product family design is currently facing a multitude of challenges, the main problem stemming from the diversity offered to consumers. To design a product family, designers have to define an efficient bill of materials which ensures product assembly within a predefined length of time in order to satisfy the synchronised delivery principle. In addi...

In this paper, we study the problem of configuring a product family which has to satisfy diversified customer requirements. Modular design strategies allow a bill of materials to be generated for various finished products from a limited subset of modules. Simultaneously, a production location must be selected for the manufacture of each module. Fro...

To design an efficient product family, designers have to anticipate the production process and, more generally, the supply chain costs. But this is a difficult problem, and designers often propose a solution which is subsequently evaluated in terms of logistical costs. This paper presents a design problem in which the product and the supply chain d...

In this paper, we present a method for ranking any number of normal fuzzy numbers using trapezoidal fuzzy numbers as a general form, where rectangular and triangular fuzzy numbers are particular cases of such a form. This general form is supported by 29 cases, which is enough to consider all the possible situations between two normal fuzzy numbers,...

Satisfying customer expectations is of paramount importance in today's markets. A customer expects to receive a product that meets as best as possible his/her expectations. To satisfy diversified requirements companies may focus on product families. For a specific customer the company has to select within a product family what will make a valid pro...

The paper focuses on modelling and solving a design problem, namely the selection of a set of modules to be manufactured at one or more distant sites and shipped to a proximity site for final assembly subject to time constraints. The problem is modelled as a mathematical one, and solved by an appropriately designed genetic algorithm enhanced with a...

More and more companies are designing product families with the aim of making mass customization a reality, offering a wider variety of products while at the same time reducing product cost by standardizing components and processes. This paper proposes a global methodology to form product families taking advantage of fuzzy product configuration. In...

Résumé - Dans cet article, nous étudions le problème de co nception d'une famille de produits devant répondre, de part sa diversité, aux attentes des clients. Cette concepti on est de type modulaire et permet de générer la no menclature des produits à partir des modules fabriqués. Conjointement à la définition des nomenclatures, le choix des sites...

An assemble to order policy considers a tradoff between the size of product portfolio and assembly lead time. The concept of modular design is often used to implement the assemble to order policy. Modular design impacts assembly of products and the supply chain. In particular storage, transportation and production are affected by the selected modul...

Smartcard automated fare collection systems (SCAFC) for transit have been consid-ered primarily for their administrative function of controlling access to the service and for revenue management. However, it is likely that data from these systems also can be used to describe both transport supply and demand. This article illustrates the use of smart...

Defining an efficient bill of materials for a family of complex products is a real challenge for companies, largely because of the diversity they offer to consumers. To remain competitive, their products are available with many variants and options, which leads to a difficult question: “How can a bill of materials be defined so that all possible pr...

Product configuration provides an important opportunity for taking advantage of a number of the benefits of mass customization. Mass customization is aimed at developing a wide external variety of products to satisfy individual customers, with managed internal diversity to prevent cost proliferation. In this context, we propose an iterative product...

When designing a new product family, designers and manufacturers have to define simultaneously the product structure and its supply chain. This leads to a complex optimization problem to solve in order to satisfy diversified customers' requirements with various options and variants. The paper focuses on the first step of this design problem. It con...

In a business world influenced by globalisation and technological progress, products are highly customized to suit each customer's demand. Companies propose a large diversity of products in order to satisfy existing customers' needs and to attract new customers. The strategy implemented by the industry to support such diversity involves creating pr...

When designing a new product family, designers and manufacturers have to define simultaneously the product structure and its supply chain. This leads to a complex optimization problem to solve in order to satisfy diversified customers' requirements with various options and variants. The paper focuses on modeling and solving this design problem. It...

On propose dans cet article la modélisation et la résolution de la conception simultanée d'une famille de produits, de son process et de sa chaîne logistique. L'objectif est de déterminer des sous assemblages (modules) à fabriquer ainsi que leur lieu de fabrication dans un contexte de livraison synchrone, tout en minimisant les coûts de production...

In large urban areas, smooth running public transit networks are key to viable development. Currently, economic and environmental issues are fueling the need for these networks to adequately serve travel demand, thereby increasing their competitiveness and their market share. Better balance between transit supply and demand will also help reduce an...