Concurrent science, engineering and technology (ConSEnT) for biomass feedstock production decision support

Abstract

Concurrent Science, Engineering, and Technology (ConSEnT) approach was used to develop and implement a web-based environment for supporting decision making on the planning, design, management, and operation of biomass feedstock production and provision systems. ConSEnT is suitable for integrating and utilizing computational resources, such as databases, models, and user interfaces, in a real-time fashion to share information and results of analysis. This web-based decision support system, BPSys, is programmed in Java and integrates the functions provided from various software packages, Apache Http Server, Apache Tomcat, Drupal, MySQL database, and JFreeChart. The graphical user interface (GUI) of BPSys is a Java applet embedded in a web page executed on users’ local machines and works as a front end. The GUI provides users easy access to biomass production scenario building tools, simulation/optimization models, and various forms of analyses and output from the models. This decision support system allows researchers and users to contribute and test the latest information about biomass production systems in a concurrent fashion. BPSys users can logon to this system anywhere via web browsers and select different scenarios, retrieve latest attributes from the database, modify attributes, execute latest models and save results through the GUI.