An Overview of Palm Biomass Supply Chain Modelling

Abstract

In the Malaysian context, the oil palm industry is one of the key contrib¬utors to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Comprehensive National Strength (CNS). According to Department of Statistic Malaysia [1], oil palm indus¬tries had contributed 3.5% or RM 38.5 billion (approximately 9.6 billion USD) to Malaysia’s GDP in 2016. To further enhance the potential of the oil palm industry, valorisation of biomass (waste product generated from the palm oil milling process) has received substantial attention from both academicians and industry players in the past few years. Conceptual design and planning, which involve process modelling, evaluation and optimisation is indeed vital to foster the development of palm biomass industry. Keeping this in mind, this chapter presents an overview of the key concerns of palm biomass supply chain, from researchers’ perspective. It covers several impor¬tant topics in supply chain modelling, covering facility location decision (e.g. site selection), transportation decision (e.g. transportation mode selection), evaluation and optimisation methodologies and the latest debottlenecking concepts.