Environmental emissions and cost vs. intermodal transportation technological development trade-off for the design of woody biomass supply chain

Abstract

Energy generation refers to a process through which energy (in two forms of heat and electricity) is extracted from waste wood. Apart from all benefits it has to human beings; this process is associated with some problems such as air pollution and high transportation cost. The logistic costs of collecting and transporting waste wood cause considerable challenges regarding scale, geography of supplier location, sustainability of supply chain, etc. Given these research challenges, this work contributes to the existing literature by developing an integrated Geographical Information System (GIS) and Agent-based simulation modeling to assess the effect of intermodal transportation (truck and train) technology developments (capacity and size) of the woody biomass supply chain (BSC) on the environmental emissions and cost. This work aims at analyzing and quantifying the environmental emissions and economic cost of woody waste BSC transportation design. The developed model is tested on the case study in Victoria-Australia. Results showed that a combination of truck and train transport with increasing size and capacity of container leads to decreasing near 60% gaseous pollutant emissions. Changing the capacity of the containers from light to medium and heavy would lead to reducing the cumulative emissions by an averagely of 46% and 59%, respectively. Finally, the sensitivity analysis results revealed that using 100% truck transportation leads to the highest emission cost for BSC. Using 80% train transportation mode by suppliers would reduce emissions by 58%.