TITLE:
Computational Tools to Support Ethanol Pipeline Network Design Decisions
AUTHORS:
Gustavo Dias da Silva, Virgílio José Martins Ferreira Filho, Laura Bahiense
KEYWORDS:
Ethanol; Pipelines; Network Design; Mathematical Programming
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Operations Research,
Vol.3 No.1,
January
30,
2013
ABSTRACT: This paper considers the pipeline network design problem (PND) in ethanol transportation, with a view to providing robust and efficient computational tools to assist decision makers in evaluating the technical and economic feasibility of ethanol pipeline network designs. Such tools must be able to address major design decisions and technical characteristics, and estimate network construction and operation costs to any time horizon. The specific context in which the study was conducted was the ethanol industry in Sao Paulo. Five instances were constructed using pseudo-real data to test the methodologies developed.