An Excel-Based Decision Support System for Supply Chain Design and Management of Biofuels

Abstract

This article presents a Decision Support System (DSS) to aid managers with supply chain (SC) design and logistics management of biomass-for-biofuel production. These tools play a very important role in efficiently managing biomass-for-biofuel SCs and have the potential to reduce the cost of biofuels. The proposed model coordinates the long-term decisions of designing a SC with the medium term decisions of logistics management. This system has the ability to (a) identify locations and capacities for biorefineries, given the availability of biomass and costs; (b) estimate the minimum cost of delivering biofuels, which include transportation, investment, and processing costs; and (c) perform sensitivity analyses with respect to a number of parameters. Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is used to create the interface of the DSS, and Excel's CPLEX Add-In is used to solve the mathematical models.