Bi-objective model for tactical planning in corn supply chain considering CO₂ balance

Abstract

This paper addresses the Brazilian corn production logistic supply chain with an optimisation model considering carbon emission from transportation and carbon sequestration from corn production. The focus is on the higher-level decision planning, which includes the best regions for corn cultivation, location and sizing of silos to store grains, transportation modes with intermodality, considering several resource constraints to meet the demands of domestic market and export. Two conflicting objectives are considered: the logistics costs of the supply chain and the balance of CO${}_2$. Accurate data are used to evaluate the model and the Pareto optimal solutions are produced in scenarios potentially feasible in practice. The solutions showed relevant information to guide decisions about investment in logistic infrastructure. We demonstrated that cleaner transportation routes lead to solutions that have larger carbon stocks with 3–5% increase in costs by only choosing more suitable regions for corn cultivation and transportation modes.

Keywords:

• Corn supply chain
• tactical logistic planning
• multi-objective optimisation
• transport intermodality
• CO${}_2$  balance
• carbon trade-offs

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All data used in this study are freely available in a repository called ‘Corn Problem’ at: https://github.com/angeloaliano/Corn-Problem.

Additional information

Funding

They also thank Lara Beatriz Carvalho Marins for making data available, and also FAPESP [process: 22/05803-3], CNPq [process: 402669/2023-1] and UTFPR for their financial support.