This handbook brings together recent advances in the areas of supply chain optimization, supply chain management, and life-cycle cost analysis of bioenergy. These topics are important for the development and long-term sustainability of the bioenergy industry.
The increasing interest in bioenergy has been motivated by its potential to become a key future energy source. The opportunities and challenges that this industry has been facing have been the motivation for a number of optimization-related works on bioenergy.
Practitioners and academicians agree that the two major barriers of further investments in this industry are biomass supply uncertainty and costs. The goal of this handbook is to present several cutting-edge developments and tools to help the industry overcome these supply chain and economic challenges.
Case studies highlighting the problems faced by investors in the US and Europe illustrate the impact of certain tools in making bioenergy an economically viable energy option.
Dr. Sandra D. Eksioglu is an Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering at Clemson University. She received her PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Florida. Dr. Eksioglu’s expertise is in the areas of operations research, network optimization, and algorithmic development. She uses these tools to develop models and solution algorithms for solving large-scale problems that arise in the areas of transportation, logistics, and supply chain. In particular, she is interested in the application of these tools to the bioenergy supply chain. In 2011, she received the NSF CAREER Award for her work on biomass-for-biofuel supply chain design and management. She is an active member of INFORMS, IIE and ASEE.
Dr. Steffen Rebennack is an Assistant Professor at the Colorado School of Mines, USA. He obtained his PhD at the University of Florida. His research interests are in dimension-reduction techniques for large-scale optimization problems, particularly with applicationsin power systems, stochastic optimization and global optimization. For his dissertation work, he has received the GOR Dissertation Award 2011 and an Honorable Mention at the 2010 George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award.
Panos M. Pardalos serves as Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. Additionally, he is the Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor in Industrial & Systems Engineering. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the Computer and Information Science Department, the Hellenic Studies Center, and the Biomedical Engineering Department. He is also the Director of the Center for Applied Optimization. Dr. Pardalos is a world leading expert in global and combinatorial optimization. His recent research interests include energy, network design problems, optimization in telecommunications, e-commerce, data mining, biomedical applications, and massive computing. Dr. Pardalos is the Editor in Chief of Energy
Systems (Springer), Fellow of AAAS and INFORMS, and member of several Academies of Sciences. In 2013 he was awarded the Constantin Carathéodory Prize, and the EURO Gold Medal
