SIMULTANEOUS OPTIMIZATION OF THE SUPPLY CHAIN CONFIGURATION AND MATERIAL FLOWS FOR COGENERATION OF ELECTRICAL AND THERMAL ENERGY FROM FOREST BIOMASS

RODRÍGUEZ, S.; BROZ, D.; ZEBALLOS, L.; DONDO, R.

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; XXI Latin Ibero-American Conference on Operations Research CLAIO 2022; 2022

Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales Universidad de Buenos Aires

Biomass comes from a wide range of raw materials. Consumption of biomass for generating energy presents several difficulties (as availability, cost, quality, conversion performance, transport-cost and the performance of the logistics system) that must be overcome for its use as fossil-fuelsreplacement. High managing costs of a biomass supply chains constitutes a strong incentive for the optimal design and optimization of them. In Argentina, forest biomass mainly originates from waste derived of the exploitation of implanted forests. Biomass of the industrial type is usually classified considering the waste generated in sawmills, such as sawdust, wood chips; bark chips and slash. The selection of materials to generate power and/or to industrialize in order to add value to the raw materials is a critical problem of the forestry industry. Indeed, this work develops a mathematical model for optimizing the topology and the material flows of a forestry industrial company supply chain located in the north of Misiones (Argentina). The feasibility of operating a 3.5 MW cogeneration plant with several biomass alternatives as raw materials is included in the developed model. The objective function aims at setting the supply chain configuration that maximizes the profit obtained by commercializing the remaining biomass while taking into account the supply flow toward the thermal plant. Optimal flows within the chain are also computed. The model, which adds the time dimension in order to improve the representation of the problem, is developed to define the supply flows of raw materials from different origins to customers and to a cogeneration plant producing electrical and thermal energy. The MILP model of the supply chain is implemented in GAMS. The formulation is proposed as a tool to determine the optimal network configuration and material flows for different scenarios considering the diverse alternatives of forest utilization, products use and energetic demand.