A Strategy for Improving the Competitiveness of Small Scale Biofuel Supply Chain

Biofuels are emerging as an important alternative to environmentally hazardous fossil fuels as a transportation fuel. To accelerate the introduction of biofuels in the current transportation fuel market dominated by fossil fuels, it is very important to supply as many customers as possible in the most economical way. The resulting biofuel supply chain problems have been actively addressed in recent years. However most previous works were concerned with designing the overall supply chain. The operational issue of the supply chain has been relatively neglected in spite of the importance. In this paper, a biofuel supply chain problem is transformed into a distribution problem and its computation method based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is proposed. Some numerical examples are presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed work with some remarks.