Key Challenges and Requirements for Sustainable and Industrialized Biorefinery Supply Chain Design and Management: A Bibliographic Analysis

The growing global population and its effects on world food security, as well as the urgency for climate change mitigation, are issues that foster technological, social, and political innovations to increase the efficiency of use of natural resources, such as biomass among others. While significant research efforts have been devoted to biomass conversion processes, their associated supply chains and their implication for complete process efficiency have only been studied more recently. However, most of the recent investigations into the design and optimization of biomass supply chains have focused on an economic point of view, sidelining other dimensions of sustainability, which represents a serious drawback for this kind of work. This article surveys the recent research on design and management optimization of biorefinery supply chains from a sustainability perspective. 72 published research articles from 2006 to 2015 have been analyzed to highlight the sustainability dimensions considered, as well as the inclusion of uncertainties. A typology of decision-making at three levels of analysis (strategic, tactical and operational), and the specific set of tools used to model and optimize the biorefinery supply chain have also been studied. The conclusion underlines the contributions and shortcomings of current research and suggests possible future directions.