Metrics for evaluating the forest biorefinery supply chain performance

• Metrics for evaluating the performance of supply chains, using forest biorefinery as case study, are introduced.
• A metric of flexibility is introduced to address volume flexibility of processes.
• A metric of robustness is developed to consider aggregate deviation of downside profits for different market scenarios.
• A conditional-value-at-risk type parameter is introduced to analyze the risk associated with sales decisions concerning contract and spot markets.
• The results illustrate how profitability of a supply chain is linked to the developed metrics.

For sustainable decision-making regarding biorefinery strategies, different criteria, i.e. economic, environmental, social, should be considered. However, the economic criteria typically do not consider market volatility, whereas today's market involves price and demand volatilities. Biorefinery strategies must be flexible to be robust to market volatility. Therefore, relevant metrics must be developed to quantify the system's performance against volatility. This paper presents metrics of flexibility and robustness which analyze the performance of the supply chain in a dynamic environment, providing additional information along with economic metrics. In this paper, the link between the two metrics, and how profitability and robustness change with flexibility are discussed. The results reveal that, although profitability does not always increase with more flexibility and there is an optimum level of flexibility, the system's robustness is improved by increasing flexibility. Moreover, a “conditional value-at-risk” parameter is introduced to show what patterns of sale lead to highest profit and robustnestness.