Logistical supply chain design for bioeconomy applications

This paper proposes and tests novel supply chain designs for bioenergy and biobased products that result in logistical costs savings of 2–38%. The proposed supply chain design reduces the costs of: (1) purchasing logistical harvesting equipment; (2) operating logistical harvesting equipment; and (3) holding feedstock inventory, by using a multitude of crop types as feedstock, instead of just one, as is common in research and practice today. In so doing, this research challenges the prevalent assumption that monocultures, despite their known environmental concerns, are preferable from a costs perspective. Simulation/optimization is used to test supply chain designs, and then to find the environmental conditions where these new supply chain designs could be most profitably implemented.