Robust two-stage optimisation in biomass supply chains

Abstract

Increasing waste utilisation is an important goal of the circular economy initiative. This paper focuses on biomass supply chains, where the waste has several utilisation possibilities, each with different quality requirements. The biomass has to be distributed among the recycling facilities, where it can be processed by different technologies, and finally, the products are transported to the customers. Due to the uncertainties in the recycling processes, the quality of the products become known only after processing the waste. Thus the basic challenge is to find a robust facility and technology selection plan, which performs well, even if some quality issues are expected. This paper introduces a novel robust optimisation model of the waste utilisation problem and presents a solution algorithm using a customised column-and-constraint generation approach.