Predictive model based architecture for energy biomass supply chains tactical decisions

Renewable sources of energy play a decisive role in the current energetic paradigm to mitigate climate changes associated with greenhouse gases emissions and problems of energy security. Biomass energy and in particular forest wood biomass supply chains have the potential to enhance these changes due to its several benefits such as ability to produce both bioenergy and bioproducts, generate energy on-demand, among others. However, this energy source has some drawbacks mainly associated with the involved costs. In this work, the use of a Model Predictive Control approach is proposed to plan, monitor and control the wood-biomass supply chain for energy production at a tactical level. With this methodology the biomass supply chain becomes more efficient ensuring the service quality in a more competitive way. In order to test and validate the proposed approach different simulation scenarios were considered that proved the efficiency of the proposed tool regarding the decisions definition and control. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.