Abstract

The increasing pressures on food supplies as well as the urgency for climate change mitigation are issues that have increased the interest on efficient use of natural resources, such as biomass. In order to take advantage of biomass potential, new technologies have been developed and the concept of bio-refineries was born. In order to use biomass at industrial scale in a sustainable way, a well-designed and well managed supply chain is a requirement. The objective of this work is to design and optimize the bio-refinery supply chain from a sustainable point of view. In order to reach this goal, it is necessary to decide which of the many hierarchical decisions involved in supply chain design will be optimized. Also, it is essential to consider the dimensions of sustainability, which are "Economic", "Social", "Environmental", "Technological" and "Political". Which determine the definition of the sustainable design criteria and optimization objectives. This results in a set of at least five objectives to be optimized, which could be contradictory. Under these conditions, not all optimization tools are suitable to solve this problem. Hence, a preliminary study is required. In addition, in order to study the behavior of the bio-refinery variables in face to uncertainty, an appropriate alternative is joining optimization and simulation. Finally, a preliminary model, integrating the proposed dimensions is presented