This study presents a mathematical model that designs a reliable multi-modal transportation network for a biofuel supply chain system while site-dependent facility failure and congestion are taken into consideration. The proposed model locates the multi-modal facilities and biorefineries and determines the optimal production, storage, and routing plans in such a way that the overall system cost is minimized. We propose a hybrid Constraint generation-based Rolling horizon algorithm to solve this challenging N P-hard problem. The performance of this algorithm is tested in a example case study with numerical analysis showing that the hybrid algorithm can find near-optimal solutions to large-scale problem instances in a reasonable amount of time. Results indicate that the effect of congestion reduces the usage of multi-modal facilities in the biofuel supply chain network while bio-refineries and multi-modal facilities tend to move away from coastal areas when disruption probabilities are taken into consideration.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.