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Key issue, challenges, and status quo of models for biofuel supply chain design 301

ABM to model the system dynamic with farms’ and biorefineries’ adaptive
decisions in the BSC network. By simulating different scenarios (e.g., dif-
ferent policy incentives), the results showed the dynamics of biomass
resource adaption and corresponding effects on the biorefinery and crop
contracts. Agusdinata et al. (2014) applied ABM to BSC network simulation
to study system behaviors of users, biorefineries, and farmers. The results
showed that the network was sensitive to the information time delay
between different stakeholders. Kempener et al. (2009) used ABM to sim-
ulate a complex adaptive system for designing the bioenergy network with
combined optimization and simulation approach. This model provided
decisions on network performance and impacts of policy enforcement on
the BSC. Scheffran and BenDor (2009) developed an ABM model with spa-
tial dynamic powered by GIS to study the BSC and corresponding land use
pattern change in Illinois. Results showed that with expanding demand for
bioenergy, farmers adopted more energy crops, which further changes the
local land use pattern. As ABM can simulate the decision-making of each
component of BSC (e.g., farms, inventory sites, biorefineries) and other
organizations (e.g., government agencies), the BSC evolution, network per-
formance, trade-offs, and complex system adaptation can be evaluated under
different policies, economic, and technical conditions. So far most of previ-
ous studies focused on stakeholders such as farms and biorefineries while
some included policy incentives from government. Given the complexity
of BSC, stakeholders at multiple scales and levels (e.g., government, food
companies, manufacturers, farms, customers) may need to be included to
better address BSC design problems through ABM. In addition, most of pre-
vious ABM studies focused on understanding the economic implications of
BSC, a potential use of ABM in the future is to take sustainability of BSC,
especially environmental and social sustainability, into consideration (Gold
and Seuring, 2011).

5 Challenges and issues in BSC design
5.1 Technical challenges and issues related to BSC component

Although intensive efforts have been made on BSC design and modeling in
the past decades, many challenges still exist. One major challenge is the
uncertainty. For example, choosing the locations and capacities of prepro-
cessing and processing sites is a widely studied topic. However, location
selections and configuration design (e.g., centralized or decentralized) still
needs case-by-case analysis that depends on the availability of different