A Decision Support System (DSS) for Biomass-to-Biofuel Supply Chain

Abstract

In the recent years, due to the increase of our awareness about environmentalissues and due to the increase of price of fuel, there has been a growing interest onbiofuels. Research efforts have been concentrated on identifying efficient ways tomanage the resources and the processes involved in converting biomass to biofuels.In this paper we present an Excel-based decision support system (DSS) to aid theprocess of designing and managing of the biomass-to-biofuel supply chain. Thesetools are very important because well managed supply chains have the potential toreduce the cost of biofuel. The DSS proposed identifies locations and capacities forbiorefineries that minimize the total of transportation and inventory costs in thesupply chain. We use this DSS to perform sensitivity analysis with respect biomasssupply, facility locations, costs, etc.