Biomass supply chain environmental and socio-economic analysis: 40-Years comprehensive review of methods, decision issues, sustainability challenges, and the way forward

Abstract

Biomass is a valuable renewable source of energy as an alternative to fossil fuels. The main barriers in biomass and biofuel development are feedstock high cost, lack of reliable supply, and uncertainties. A systematic review of comprehensive solution tools to overcome the biomass supply chain (BSC) planning challenges is critical for both academic research and industry. Therefore, the aim of this study is to conduct a systematic review of BSC modeling and optimization and identify future research directions. We reviewed 300 papers that have been published in the past 40 years on this topic to assess the various models of BSCs, their objective functions, solution approaches, and decision levels employed. Results show that researchers are motivated to use mixed integer programming models for BSC problems because of the complexities of nonlinear models, as well as the simplicity of the linear approaches. There is a lack of multi-objective optimization approaches to address the economic, social, and environmental issues simultaneously in BSC. Although factors such as the political regulation, governmental subsidy, impact of biomass and oil price and cost of raw material are uncertain, most studies formally treat only the supply and demand of biomass as uncertain parameters. It is highly recommended that an integrated and holistic model that consider all facilities in the whole BSC be developed and tested with real data. In addition, incorporating strategic, tactical, and operational decision levels in the model is suggested to address the challenges of incorporating day-to-day inventory control and fleet management issues.