While ever-growing bio-ethanol production poses considerable challenges to the bioenergy supply chain, the risk of refinery operation disruptions further compromises the efficiency and reliability of the energy supply system. This paper applies discrete and continuous reliable facility location...

Commuting, like other types of human travel, is complex in nature, such as trip-chaining behavior involving making stops of multiple purposes between two anchors. According to the 2001 National Household Travel Survey, about one half of weekday U.S. workers made a stop during their commute. In...

This paper shows how to reduce the bullwhip effect by introducing advance demand information (ADI) into the ordering schemes of supply chains. It quantifies the potential costs and benefits of ADI, and demonstrates that they are not evenly distributed across the chain. Therefore, market-based...

This paper analyzes the bullwhip effect in decentralized, linear and time-invariant (LTI) supply chains. It generalizes existing results by broadening the class of policies and customer demand processes under consideration. The supply chain is modeled as a single-input, singleoutput control...

We discuss a few supply chain design concepts and optimization models that have been applied in the energy sector. It is not our intention to provide a comprehensive review of the vast literature. Our goal is to provide the reader with pointers to some interesting and challenging problems,...

We characterize the impact of biofuel industry development on farmland use competition, referred to as the food-energy-environment trilemma: to grow food or energy crops, or to reserve the land for environmental conservation. We develop an analytical game-theoretic model to analyze the role and...

This article addresses development of the Illinois ethanol industry through the period 2007-2022, responding to the ethanol production mandates of the Renewable Fuel Standard by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The planning for corn-based and cellulosic ethanol production requires...

This paper proposes an algorithm that automatically translates the "continuum approximation" (CA) recipes for location problems into discrete designs. It is applied to terminal systems but can also be used for other logistics problems. The study also systematically compares the logistics costs...

Reliable facility location models consider unexpected failures with site-dependent probabilities, as well as possible customer reassignment. This paper proposes a compact mixed integer program (MIP) formulation and a continuum approximation (CA) model to study the reliable uncapacitated fixed...