Computational Tools to Support Ethanol Pipeline Network Design Decisions.docVIP

American Journal of Operations Research, 2013, 3, 1-16 /10.4236/ajor.2013.31001 Published Online January 2013 (/journal/ajor) Computational Tools to Support Ethanol Pipeline Network Design Decisions Gustavo Dias da Silva , Virgílio José Martins Ferreira Filho, Laura Bahiense * Production Engineering Program, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Email: * gustavodias.po@, virgilio@ufrj.br, laura@pep.ufrj.br Received November 16, 2012; revised December 17, 2012; accepted December 30, 2012 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 characteris- tics, 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 S?o Paulo. Five instances were constructed using pseudo-real data to test the methodologies developed. Keywords: Ethanol; Pipelines; Network Design; Mathematical Programming 1. Introduction optimization approaches taken to solving the problem; Section 5 reports the results and conclusions; and Section 6 offers some final remarks on the study. People use networks daily (sometimes unwittingly) in a wide range of contexts. Telephony networks, logistics networks for freight transportation and distribution net- works (water, energy) provide services that are essential to modern life and, therefore, must be properly designed to ensure service quality and meet user demands. Brazil is projected to be both a major producer and supplier of biofuels, particularly biodiesel and ethanol. These fuels are gaining importance on the world stage in view of the environmental, technological and economic impa