BIOloop

This project builds on the expertise of partners UGent, VITO, and AMS, leveraging Flanders’ strategic position as a central logistics hub. It will involve building decision support models (DSMs) to analyse and optimize biomass supply chain flows, ultimately fostering better connections between supply and demand and promoting high-end biobased industrial applications.

Goal

The main objective of the BIOLOOP project is to create a knowledge framework that will support the design and optimization of biobased supply chains in Flanders. To achieve this goal, BIOLOOP aims to generate new insights into the mobilization of biomass, including residual biomass. The project will also focus on understanding how technological, economic, and social parameters and constraints shape both existing and new supply chains. The knowledge and rules obtained will be integrated into four new generic decision support models (DSMs). These models will be used to simulate and optimize the mobilization of biomass feedstock, considering multi-feedstock scenarios for multi-high-value applications. Additionally, circular and sustainable principles, as well as novel business models and collaboration strategies, will be taken into account.

More specifically, BIOLOOP will:

1. Define and prioritize the most decisive input parameters and indicators behind the techno-economic, environmental and social criteria to improve biomass demand-supply matching and thereby enhance reststream mobilization and logistics in Flanders
2. Integrate circularity and collaboration concepts in a generic multi-objective optimization model for bio-based supply chain design
3. Explore how to include additional circularity concepts into current biomass supply chain approaches, derive mathematical rules for them and identify the most decisive input parameters and indicators behind circular biomass mobilization and logistics
4. Assess novel collaboration options and gain sharing models in relation to biomass mobilization and logistics in Flanders
5. Explore the use of supply chain models (in this case comprehensive, generic BIOLOOP DSMs) for the design of biobased supply chains for multi-biobased feedstocks towards multiple high-value endproducts, incorporating techno-economical, environmental and social criteria, circularity concepts and collaboration options in relation to biomass mobilization and logistics
6. Evaluate how model complexity impact the outcomes of the biomass valorization simulations for three real industrial cases.