Optimally running a biomass-based energy production process

A multi-plant biomass-based energy production process is able to extract the chemical energy from various agricultural products. Such a process consists of several plants that are able to deal with biomasses of different types. Each type of plant has distinct mass-to-energy yields for each particular product type. Since the scale of the process may be geographically wide, transportation costs also have an impact on the overall profitability. Biomasses have different unit costs, and endproducts (electrical energy, refined bioethanol, but also several other cross-products of the biomasses that are not necessarily energy-related) have different selling prices; hence, deciding the amount of each different biomass to process in order to maximize revenues and minimize costs is a nontrivial task. In this paper we propose a mathematical programming formulation of this problem and discuss its application to a real-world example.