Integrated and sustainable forest biomass supply chain planning

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There is a growing interest in using forest biomass to generate bioenergy in Canada. Forest biomass is a renewable and clean source of energy. Its utilization for energy production reduces dependency on fossil fuels and their negative environmental impacts, creates jobs and provides sustainable and domestic energy for communities. Moreover, utilizing forest biomass has the benefit of providing a new revenue stream for the forest industry in Canada, which despite its significant impact on our economy has been facing many challenges during the past two decades. Canada and especially British Columbia have large amount of forest biomass. The recent infestation of mountain pine beetle within the forests of interior BC has resulted in a cumulative total of 723 million cubic meters of dead wood. One proposed solution for the forest industry to remain competitive is to utilize the large amount of available forest biomass to produce bioenergy and bioproducts. The feasibility of bioenergy/ bioproducts projects depends on the long-term availability of forest biomass at a competitive cost and desired quality. There is variability in the amount and quality (moisture content and heating value) of forest biomass supply over time. Its transportation is costly and it has a complex supply chain. Mathematical models that consider and optimize the entire forest biomass supply chain are helpful to ensure consistent delivery of desired feedstock is possible at a low cost. A few studies have modeled and optimized the economic benefits of forest biomass supply chain for bioenergy production. In addition to economic benefits, social and environmental objectives have to be considered in the supply chain models in order to have sustainable development. Another key aspect is to make sure that the long-term decisions from multi-objective models are attainable at the operational level. The review of literature reveals the key attempts by researchers to use deterministic mathematical programming approaches to optimize the supply chains, stochastic programming and simulation to incorporate uncertainties, and multi-objective optimization to consider social and environmental objectives in addition to economic benefits in the models for sustainable development. It is a challenge to incorporate variations in biomass quality as biomass moves through the supply chain in optimization models. In addition, there are computational complexities associated with solving optimization models for real case scenarios as they are usually very large sized problems. To date, there is no published work on modeling and optimizing the design and management of forest biomass supply chains considering sustainability factors (economic, social and environmental impacts) as well as uncertainties, especially those related to the quality of forest biomass, in the supply chains. Moreover, there is no integrated study to ensure that the prescribed design of forest biomass supply chains by optimization models is practical and attainable at the operational level. Due to variability and uncertainty in parameters, decisions prescribed by strategic or tactical models may not be feasible or achievable at the operational level. Therefore, it is timely to focus on forest biomass supply chain and develop integrated and sustainable optimization models. The proposed proposal will address this gap and challenging problem. The objectives of the proposed research are 1) to optimize the design of forest biomass supply chains that are achievable at the operational level considering uncertainties in the parameters and sustainability factors (this will be done by developing new integrated simulation and optimization models), 2) solve the integrated models, and 3) apply them to real case scenarios in Canada.