Marginalization index as social measure for Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol supply chain planning

Abstract Most of methodologies for evaluating supply chain have been focused on environmental and economic criteria. Even though, social impact has been addressed in some methodologies, these methodologies have not considered the location where social impact takes place, which is a crucial issue when the social impact is measured. Therefore, the research purpose is to consider the social impact as a function of the supply chain facilities location. This is accomplished through a multi-objective approach for planning of a biomass supply chain considering simultaneously several objective functions: a) the social impact in function the location where it occurs, b) net profit and c) net CO2 emissions. Specifically, proposed mathematical model considers a social objective function based on the marginalization index. Multi-objective approach was addressed via generating several Pareto curves to illustrate the tradeoff between the considered objectives. Maximum reached profit was around $US 13,572 Million per year that can be obtained with two different pairwise analysis. Nevertheless, if the social benefit is maximized, the profit decrease until $US 6000 Million per year. Therefore, results indicate that supply chain entity's location has a crucial effect in the social impact. Additionally, a direct correlation between social functions other objectives was not observed. This approach addressed the lack of studies for the supply chain planning involving social impact functions, which should be multi-factorial. The proposed approach is applied to an important industrial process, the Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE) process, to contribute to the bioenergy sector developing.