Bioenergy Australia Webinar Series – Decision Support System for Biorefinery Transformation Strategies: I-BIOREF Software Platform

Decision Support System for Biorefinery Transformation Strategies:
I-BIOREF Software Platform

Decision-making in the biorefinery context is not a straightforward process, as complex problems involve numerous options or alternatives as well as an array of predefined criteria, which differ in nature and include technical, economic, environmental, market, social, policy, and supply chain related aspects. In addition, decision-makers today require quick, efficient and integrated methods for comparing various biorefinery and bioeconomy alternatives for a wide range of investment scenarios. Thus, a decision support system for successful decision-making must be able to provide decision metrics based on the use of mass and energy balances, for the calculation of technical, economic and environmental impacts as well as evaluation criteria. From this standpoint, Natural Resources Canada provided the means to develop such an integrative decision making platform, namely I-BIOREF, to help the forest industry make better informed and successful transition toward a low-carbon and sustainable economy, in addition to being correctly positioned to advance the next generation of transformation through biobased solutions.
I-BIOREF supports decision-makers in selecting viable biorefinery solutions and evaluating the benefits of implementing commercially available biorefinery processes:

• I-BIOREF is a project design tool for creating biorefinery projects in a stepwise manner, and quantifying their technical, economic and environmental impacts.
• I-BIOREF enables creation of multiple scenarios and provides metrics to be used for multi-criteria decision making.
• I-BIOREF architecture is flexible enough so that new technologies can be easily incorporated, regardless of their complexity.

• 6:00 PM – 6:05 PM: Welcoming address (Speaker: Marzouk Benali)
• 6:05 PM – 6:20 PM: CanmetENERGY’ biorefinery R&D program and highlights on the key achievements (Speaker: Marzouk Benali)
• 6:20 PM – 7:20 PM: I-BIOREF software platform and its key features/functionalities demonstrated through industrial case studies to illustrate how I-BIOREF can be used as a decision support system (Speakers: Behrang Mansoornejad and Olumoye [Moye] Ajao)
• 7:20 PM – 7:45 PM: Open discussion (Speakers: All participants)