Biomass feedstock supply chain design – a taxonomic review and a decomposition-based methodology

Abstract

In this paper, we present a taxonomic review of the literature devoted to the use of operations research approaches for the design and operation of biomass feedstock supply chains (BFSCs). A total of 185 publications that have appeared from 1989 to 2017 are classified based on (1) the embedded optimisation subproblems; (2) the modelling methodologies used for their formulations; and (3) the methods employed for their solution. Our objective of using this classification scheme is to highlight the presence of some useful substructures in a BFSC problem that can, then, be exploited in developing its solution procedure. We illustrate this idea on some generic BFSC problems and present a Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition-based methodology for developing customised approaches to effectively tackle these difficult and large-sized BFSC problems. Finally, we suggest several promising future research directions.

Keywords:

• biomass
• feedstock
• logistics
• supply chain management
• optimisation
• decomposition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work presented in this paper was supported in part by a grant from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) (grant number 2016-10008-25318).