Integrated procurement planning for supplying energy plant with forest, fossil, and wood-waste fuels

In this paper, a potential solution to large-scale and long-term industrial fuel procurement scheduling problems is considered. The problems include the allocation of a number of fossil, peat, and wood-waste fuel procurement chains to an energy plant during different periods. This decision environment is further complicated by sequence-dependent procurement chains for forest fuels. A dynamic linear programming model was used to describe the scheduling task. This approach can be efficiently used for modelling material flows in procurement planning. However, due to the complex nature of the problem, the resulting model cannot be directly used to solve the integrated planning problem in a manner that is relevant to the forest industry. Therefore, this approach was combined with an energy-flow model to better describe the combinatorial complexity. The properties of this methodology are discussed and two examples of how the model works based on real-world data and an optional emissions cost constraint are presented.