Abstract: Integrating economic, environmental, and social impacts into optimal design of a biomass supply chain for semi-arid areas
Scarce water resources have made crop production as a key management decision in the agriculture sector, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. In this talk, optimization approaches are applied to design sustainable biomass supply chains, from field production planning, harvesting scheduling, process facility location, transportation, to machinery scheduling, with the consideration of economic benefits, environmental and social impacts. The whole supply chain involves of three major decision support modules, and each of them is modeled through an advanced optimization model through stochastic, multi-objective or large-scale optimization. The proposed methods are studied for two low-water-use crops which have great potential for the agricultural economy of the Southwestern America, with the analysis on their economic, environmental, and social impacts of the semi-arid areas.