Metrics for evaluating the forest biorefinery supply chain performance

The forest biorefinery (FBR) is emerging as a possibility for improving the business model of forest product companies, however introduces significant challenges in terms of market, technological, and financial risks which can be addressed to an important extent in the design of supply chains (SC). For sustainable decision-making regarding biorefinery strategies, criteria from different perspectives, i.e. economic, environmental and social, should be considered. The economic criteria that are used for decision making typically do not consider volatility, whereas today’s market is subject to volatilities in terms of price and demand. It is critical that biorefinery strategies are flexible in order to be robust to market volatility. This paper presents metrics of flexibility and robustness, showing the performance of the SC in a dynamic environment. These metrics are suitable to be used in a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework for the evaluation of the FBR SC strategies. Moreover, a “conditional value-at-risk” parameter is introduced for analyzing levels of risks in making market-related decisions.