Particle Swarm Optimization for the biomass supply chain strategic planning

Particle Swarm Optimization is a very well established evolutionary optimization technique that has shown great potential for the solution of various optimization problems. In this paper, a real-life application, namely a biomass supply chain where optimal biomass flows from sources to energy production plants must be suitably defined, is tackled by using a variant of PSO recently introduced by the authors. In particular, the performance of the variant herein proposed is investigated by applying the model to the strategic planning of the biomass supply chain. The optimization problem is non-linear with binary and continuous decision variables and is based on a previous formalization regarding the biomass strategic planning, but with the addition of integer decision variables for plant technologies selection. The model has been applied to the mountain community of Val Bormida (Savona district, Italy).