Designing a Reliable and Congested Multi-Modal Facility Location Problem for Biofuel Supply Chain Network

• Published in: Energies (Basel) Vol. 11; no. 7; p. 1682
• Main Authors: Poudel, Sushil, Marufuzzaman, Mohammad, Quddus, Md, Chowdhury, Sudipta, Bian, Linkan, Smith, Brian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 2018
• Subjects: Algorithms; Biodiesel fuels; biofuel supply chain network; Biofuels; Biomass; Case studies; Coastal zone; Congestion; constraint generation algorithm; Disruption; Mathematical models; multi-modal facilities; Numerical analysis; Operations research; Refineries; rolling horizon heuristic; Routing; Site selection; Supply chains; Transportation
• ISSN: 1996-1073; 1996-1073
• DOI: 10.3390/en11071682

This study presents a mathematical model that designs a reliable multi-modal transportation network for a biofuel supply chain system while site-dependent facility failure and congestion are taken into consideration. The proposed model locates the multi-modal facilities and biorefineries and determines the optimal production, storage, and routing plans in such a way that the overall system cost is minimized. We propose a hybrid Constraint generation-based Rolling horizon algorithm to solve this challengingNP-hard problem. The performance of this algorithm is tested in a example case study with numerical analysis showing that the hybrid algorithm can find near-optimal solutions to large-scale problem instances in a reasonable amount of time. Results indicate that the effect of congestion reduces the usage of multi-modal facilities in the biofuel supply chain network while bio-refineries and multi-modal facilities tend to move away from coastal areas when disruption probabilities are taken into consideration.