Abstract

Concerns about global warming and pollution foster technological, social, and political innovations to increase the efficiency of natural resources use, such as biomass among others [1]. In order to take advantage of biomass potential as feedstock for food, energy and chemical products, new technologies and the biorefinery concept have been developed [1]. However, the use of biomass at industrial scale in a sustainable way requires a well-designed and well managed biorefinery supply chain (BioRSC) [1], where BioRSC hierarchical decisions should be optimized [2]. The decision-making process across the various activities of the BioRSC is analyzed under three decision perspectives: strategic, tactical and operational [3]. Strategic decisions are the basis for subsequent tactical and operational decisions. As a consequence, the design of the strategic level is the most important at the upstream phase of a project, because it covers long-term decisions in the BioRSC design [4,5,6], such as target market selection, pretreatment and principal productions plants location, technology selection and production capacity, and selection of biomass type and location among others. In relation to the sustainable analysis, environmental, social and economic dimensions are sometimes referred to as the "three pillars" of sustainability or the "triple bottom-line" (TBL) [7,8]. Recently, the TBL was extended including political and technological dimensions for biodiesel sustainability analysis (TBL+) [9]. If biodiesel is a product of a biorefinery and the characteristics of its supply chain are typical of any other biorefinery product, TBL+ can also be applied to any type of this type of industrial plants [1]. As TBL+ is a recent concept, it is understandable that BioRSC optimization has been comprehensively studied only from the traditional economic, environmental and social points of view, misleading the assessment of political and technological dimensions [1]. In particular, political dimension is highly relevant for biorefineries because Government’s policies are essential for promoting production, creating economic conditions and favorable markets [9]. Moreover, technological dimension is also relevant, considering emerging technologies, technological learning or technology substitution, among others factors that impact biorefineries performance [9]. Hence, the objective of this work is to design a BioRSC including economic, technological and politic variables as decision making criteria. The present paper seeks to study simultaneously this set of objectives, some of which may be complementary while others could be contradictory. To achieve this goal, a new approach is proposed, and an optimization multi-objective model integrating the proposed dimensions is developed.