Facilities Location for Residual Biomass Production System Using Geographic Information System under Uncertainty

Biomass is a renewable resource that has attractive characteristics for manufacturing many types of products such as biofuels, specialty chemicals, and energy generation. Several studies have addressed diverse important features such as new technologies for biomass treatment, approaches for potential location of refineries, models to evaluate existing relationships between availability and price, among others. However, two important issues need to be considered: potential locations for biomass processing systems facilities considering geographic constraints, as well as uncertainty associated with biomass availability over time. Thus, this paper presents an approach to determine viable facility locations for supply chains based on residual biomass. This work has used a tool based on geographic information systems in order to involve environmental, social and geographic restrictions. Some of considered environmental features are exclusion of protected areas, vegetation type according with human activities, and water bodies location. Also, the approach considers technical constraints given by the terrain slope, wetland zones, distance to transportation infrastructure, distance to power grids and power plants, etc. In addition, social constrains such as distance to urban and rural communities, and historic monuments are included as well. Additionally, climatic aspects such as frequency of drought and hurricanes have been also taken into account. Besides, this work has considered the effect of biomass uncertainty through several scenarios, based on historical data for residual biomass availability, to include variations over time of this factor on biomass processing systems. The proposed geographic information system was tested for a nationwide case study in Mexico to determine viable regions to locate biomass processing systems facilities. The results show that biomass availability variations over time due to uncertainty have a strong effect on viable regions to install facilities in a supply chain based on biomass. Furthermore, the results also illustrate the influence of the type of raw material on the number of potential locations. This method is useful to define potential locations to be taken into account in problems like supply chain design or planning problem because it is possible to decrease considerably the number of options to choose accounting social, environmental, and geographic issues as well as uncertainty associated with biomass availability.