Reliable Biomass Supply Chain Design under Feedstock Seasonality and Probabilistic Facility Disruptions

Abstract

Abstract:While biomass has been recognized as an important renewable energy source which has a range of positive impacts on the economy, environment, and society, the existence of feedstock seasonality and risk of service disruptions at collection facilities potentially compromises the efficiency and reliability of the energy supply system. In this paper, we consider reliable supply chain design for biomass collection against feedstock seasonality and time-varying disruption risks. We optimize facility location, inventory, biomass quantity, and shipment decisions in a multi-period planning horizon setting. A real-world case in Hubei, China is studied to offer managerial insights. Our computational results show that: (1) the disruption risk significantly affects both the optimal facility locations and the supply chain cost; (2) no matter how the failure probability changes, setting backup facilities can significantly decrease the total cost; and (3) the feedstock seasonality does not affect locations of the collection facilities, but it affects the allocations of collection facilities and brings higher inventory cost for the biomass supply chain.

An integrated location-inventory model for a spare part’s supply chain considering facility disruption risk and CO2 emission

“…Previously, most researchers consider storage or distribution center disruption risk only (Liu, Wang & Ouyang, 2017;Rayat et al, 2017;Fattahi & Govindan, 2018;Azadeh & Arani 2016;Rabbani, Aliabadi, Heidari & Farrokhi-Asl, 2017). Disruption may also occur in the manufacturing plant.…”

Net Electricity and Heat Generated by Reusing Mediterranean Agro-Industrial By-Products

“…Several technologies for renewable energy (i.e., solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass) have been widely analyzed, and by considering the cost-effectiveness and the positive externalities, bioenergy from biomasses could offer a versatile solution, mainly for rural communities where relevant quantities of agricultural biomasses are produced [9,10]. In rural areas, the harnessing of biomass for Hohn et al used GIS data to analyze the spatial distribution and amount of potential biomass feedstock for biomethane production and optimal locations, and also the size and number of biogas plants in southern Finland [34].…”

Simulation Modeling for Reliable Biomass Supply Chain Design Under Operational Disruptions

“…There have been several studies on modeling Biomass Supply Chain (BSC) compiled in review papers (Sharma et al, 2013;Zandi Atashbar et al, 2017). Initially, BSC models were designed under deterministic settings, but when the dynamic nature of BSC along with its complexity and uncertainty was recognized, researchers incorporated risks in models to improve system resilience and reliability (Bai et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2017). The majority of studies have been based on mathematical programming and heuristics (Atashbar et al, 2016) and some studies involved simulation (Hansen et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2018) modeling.…”

“…A few studies have evaluated the impact of storage (Liu et al, 2017), biorefinery characteristics (Bai et al, 2015), and intermodal facilities disruptions (Marufuzzaman et al, 2014) due to flooding, hurricane, and drought, on costs and BSC network design. In the majority of static planning models, the failure probabilities were considered unchanged over time (Liu et al, 2017). To the best of our knowledge, existing approaches focus only on failures at a facility, however, impact of failure at a facility on all the entities in the supply chain is not evaluated and could significantly impact overall reliability of a system.…”