Design of wood biomass supply chains

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose a mathematical programming approach to minimize the total cost in a biomass supply chain. A company that collects material from forests, transforms it into chipped product, stores and delivers it to its customers is considered. For tackling all the aspects of the supply chain management, a mixed integer programming model that supports tactical and operational decisions was developed and optimized using a general purpose solver. The model was implemented in C++ and several computational tests have been performed.