Food supply chains play a fundamental role in society by ensuring the availability, safety, and accessibility of food products. However, significant inefficiencies along these chains lead to substantial food losses and waste at multiple stages, from production and processing to distribution and consumption. Given the growing environmental, economic, and social concerns surrounding food supply chains, a redesign and a transition to more sustainable operations is needed. Circular Economy (CE) can provide targets for this transition. CE is an economy that is restorative and regenerative by design and aims to keep products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times.
Styliani Avraamidou,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
While CE aims to close product supply chain loops, such a transition would result into complex interconnections among diverse supply chain elements and multiple stakeholders, creating significant challenges for decision making. A holistic systems engineering approach is thus required to navigate the multi-scale, multi- faceted, and interconnected circular economy model, identify opportunities for synergistic benefits, and systematically explore interactions and trade-offs.
This seminar will introduce the foundations of a Circular Economy Systems Engineering framework for the analysis and trade-off optimization of interconnected resource networks and their transition towards a CE. The framework combines data analytics, mixed-integer modelling and multi-objective optimization to establish (i) the interconnections between different stages of the circular supply chain, involving alternative processes, materials, resources and technological options, (ii) the potentially competing interests amongst various stakeholders, and (iii) policy and regulation impacts. The versatility, potential, applicability, and limitations of CE and the proposed framework will be demonstrated through representative case studies on i) food packaging and ii) the valorization of food processing residues.
Styliani Avraamidou is the Duane H. and Dorothy M. Bluemke Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a MEng and a Ph.D. from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. She has authored or co-authored major research publications in the areas of circular economy, food-energy-water nexus, multi-level optimization, system modeling, process control, energy and systems engineering applications. She is the co-executive director of the multi- institution “Center for Mineral and Metal Oxide Removal from Biomass (CMORE)”. She has published one book on the area of multi-level mixed-integer optimization. She has been awarded the 2023 International Society of Global Optimization Young Researcher Award.