Improving strategic decision-making with simulation based decision support systems

摘要

Combating climate change is one of the key tasks of humanity in the 21stcentury. One of the leading causes is carbon dioxide emissions due tousage of fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources should be used insteadof relying on oil, gas, and coal. In Finland a significant amount of energy isproduced using wood. The usage of wood chips is expected to increase inthe future significantly, over 60 %.The aim of this research is to improve understanding over the costs ofwood chip supply chains. This is conducted by utilizing simulation as themain research method. The simulation model utilizes both agent-basedmodelling and discrete event simulation to imitate the wood chip supplychain. This thesis concentrates on the usage of simulation based decisionsupport systems in strategic decision-making. The simulation model is partof a decision support system, which connects the simulation model todatabases but also provides a graphical user interface for the decisionmaker.The main analysis conducted with the decision support systemconcentrates on comparing a traditional supply chain to a supply chainutilizing specialized containers. According to the analysis, the containersupply chain is able to have smaller costs than the traditional supply chain.Also, a container supply chain can be more easily scaled up due to fasteremptying operations. Initially the container operations would only supplypart of the fuel needs of a power plant and it would complement thecurrent supply chain. The model can be expanded to include intermodalsupply chains as due to increased demand in the future there is notenough wood chips located close to current and future power plants.