4 Presentations

• 
  03:30 PM - 03:55 PM

  Coffee Waste Smart Transformation: Innovating Sustainable Business Models

  • Hanieh Zohourfazeli, presenter, Department of System Engineering École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS)
  • Ali Sabaghpourfard, Department of IT Operation Air Canada Vacation
  • Amin Chaabane, École de technologie supérieure
  • Armin Jabbarzadeh, Département de génie des systems, École de technologie supérieure

  Global coffee consumption has continuously grown, leading to an increase in spent coffee grounds generation. In this research, we investigate the creation of innovative business models focused on establishing intelligent and eco-friendly systems for gathering and processing spent coffee grounds. The research consists of a literature review, a data management module, an optimization module, a simulation module, and a financial evaluation module. Coffee waste collected from coffee shops transforms into versatile activated carbon, essential across industries, supported by financial evaluation covering operational costs, capital expenditures, and cash flow projections for a comprehensive financial outlook. The focus is on evaluating two different models, one of which involves circular coffee shops equipped with pre-drying technology, while the other does not. The optimization in this research supports integrated decisions on location, allocation, and optimal routing among in the collection network. Through simulating scenarios, this research analyzes the impact of uncertainties on sustainable coffee waste management. These scenarios are designed based on the participation rate of coffee shops in our proposed model. It provides valuable insights into system robustness and adaptability. The project highlights distinct advantages in coffee waste management system notably reduced economic, social, and environmental impacts.

• 
  03:55 PM - 04:20 PM

  Multiperiod strategic planning of carbon capture and sequestration: a slope scaling heuristic

  • Gabriel Homsi, presenter, CanmetENERGY
  • Étienne Ayotte-Sauvé, CanmetENERGY
  • Sanjay Dominik Jena, Université du Québec à Montréal

  Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a decarbonization strategy that involves capturing CO2 at emitter sites and transporting it to geological sequestration sites, where it is injected underground for long-term storage. Recent studies indicate that to meet the net-zero carbon emissions objectives of more than 140 countries around the world, CCS will likely be necessary.

  We consider the strategic planning of pipeline-based CCS, which exhibits characteristics of facility location and network design problems. Data uncertainty may require solving this problem thousands of times. Therefore, reaching high-quality solutions in a few minutes is important. Computational experiments show that commercial solvers struggle to attain these requirements.

  To address this issue, a novel slope scaling heuristic was previously introduced by Homsi, Ayotte-Sauvé and Jena. This heuristic approximates the cost of design variables, has long-term memory search strategies, generates upper bounds with dynamic programming, and has a final improving phase where a restricted model is solved iteratively.

  In this presentation, we provide updated results for this heuristic along with additional performance insights. These new results show that the heuristic generates better solutions than CPLEX for most (58%) experiments (average relative improvement of 10%), at a fraction (10%) of the CPU time.

• 
  04:20 PM - 04:45 PM

  Hyper-Parameter Tuning for Waste Image Classification Using Bayesian Optimization

  • Issmail El Hallaoui, presenter, GERAD, Polytechnique Montréal
  • Amina Lamghari, Université McGill
  • Meisseme Kadri, GERAD

  We introduce a Bayesian-based optimization approach that jointly optimizes the learning rate of the Adam algorithm and the number of units in the dense layer of the MobileNetV2 architecture. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on an image classification dataset that consists of 2527 images of various waste types, such as plastic, paper, metal, organic, etc. Classifying these images accurately is a real-world challenge in the waste management sector, as it can facilitate more precise waste sorting, which in turn can enhance recycling efficiency and contribute to environmental sustainability. Computational results indicate that our approach outperforms Grid Search and Random Search, increasing the accuracy by up to 4.92\% and reducing the execution time by up to 66.18\%.

• 
  04:45 PM - 05:10 PM

  Inventory dynamics at the retailer—An economic and environmental analysis of packaging fresh produce

  • Marjolein Buisman, WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management
  • Sonja Ursula Katharina Rohmer, presenter, HEC Montréal

  The use of packaging materials for food products and the associated environmental impact has received increasing attention in public discourse over recent years. At the same time, packaging solutions provide functional properties that help to preserve fresh produce and protect food from external damage. Given these trade-offs, it can be very challenging for retailers to make the right decisions, lowering their environmental impact. This is further complicated by the complex nature of inventory dynamics in the case of perishable products, as multiple factors can impact food waste and the environmental impact at the retailer. This research proposes a simulation model to investigate the effect of packaging as well as a variety of other factors on profit, waste and the environmental impact of products. For this purpose, the environmental impacts of three different products and their corresponding packaging solutions were quantified using a life cycle approach, and a number of experiments considering different demand patterns, service level requirements, batch sizes and order policies were carried out. The findings of this research are manifold, highlighting the importance of considering inventory and packaging decisions within an integrated framework. Moreover, while the shelf life extension obtained from the use of packaging has clear economic benefits due to the resulting lower waste levels, the environmental impact varies depending on the considered products, packaging material and environmental indicator.