چكيده به لاتين
The alarming rate of growth of global primary energy consumption has been addressed numerous times in the past studies. Fossil fuels which are the most common, most efficient and most polluting fuels available, are running out. Therefore, different countries and organizations are looking for a way to reduce dependence on these types of fuels as well as reduce the overall energy consumption for production and delivering their products and services. It is clear that the current energy consumption rate, which results from the use of predominantly fossil fuels, can also affect other aspects of various industries - environmental and social aspects - in addition to economic impacts. Therefore, increasing efficiency across the supply chain of any industry can be an important step to reduce unnecessary outputs and inputs while maintaining or increasing production to achieve sustainable industry. For this purpose, in this research, an optimization model for designing an efficient energy supply chain network is presented. Supply chain integration in the proposed model means that both the manufacturing and transportation sectors, which in here, are a generalization of the vehicle routing problem, are selected to increase efficiency. In this research, totally different approaches are used to increase the efficiency of these two sectors. However, the common denominator for both sectors in order to achieve this goal is the use of a comprehensive and very common measure in the science of thermodynamics called "exergy". Exergy is used to evaluate the efficiency of different systems as well as considering the effects of alternative fuels. For the model presented in this study, several heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms have been used for different parts of the model, which give the ability to obtain a satisfactory solution in a satisfactory time frame even for large-scale problems.
