Objective reduction in multi-criteria optimization of integrated bioethanol-sugar supply chains

Abstract The design of more sustainable bioethanol supply chains (SCs) has recently emerged as an active area of research. Most of the approaches presented so far focus on minimizing the emitted greenhouse gases (GHG) as unique criterion, neglecting the damage caused in other impact categories. In this work, we address the multi-objective design of integrated sugar/bioethanol SCs considering several life cycle assessment (LCA) impacts. To overcome the numerical difficulties of dealing with several objective functions, we apply a rigorous MILP-based dimensionality reduction method that minimizes the error of omitting objectives.