A Model to Locate and Supply Bio-refineries in Large-Scale Multi-biomass Supply Chains
Abstract
Biofuels derived from biomass can play a crucial role as one of the main sources of renewable energies. As logistics may represent up to 50% of biomass cost, it is necessary to design efficient biomass supply chains to provide bio-refineries with adequate quantities of biomass at reasonable prices and appropriate times. The task is challenging since, contrary to industrial logistics, the raw materials (oilseed and lignocellulosic crops) are produced slowly, seasonally, and with a limited yield, over vast territories. The paper proposes a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) to optimize a multi-period and multi-biomass supply chain for several bio-refineries, at the tactical decision level. The locations of refineries can be fixed by the user or determined by the model. The aim is to minimize the total cost of the supply chain, including biomass production, pretreatments, storage, handling, bio-refineries setup and transportation, while satisfying given refinery demands in each period. The resulting MILP, already validated on medium-size instances, will be applied to a large-scale real case covering two regions of France (Champagne-Ardenne and Picardie) with 273 territorial units and 8 biomass types.