(4bv) Integrating Environmental Economics into Supply Chains with Systems Engineering Approaches

Research Interests
Environmental Economics: Supply chain research usually treats environmental concerns as a separate issue to supply chain performance, or as a secondary objective at odds with supply chain efficiency. My view is that economic models can capture the implicit economic value of environmental factors in the context of complex multi-stakeholder supply chains, and in doing so provide policymakers with important information about tradeoffs between different supply chain systems. This approach to supply chains provides a natural link to life cycle analysis (LCA) to incorporate sustainability objectives into supply chain systems. This approach has applications not only in physical supply chains (e.g., industrial chemicals, electrical power systems) but also in data and information supply chains, which have important economic and environmental characteristics of their own.

Multi-Stakeholder Supply Chains: Most supply chain research treats a supply chain as one monolithic entity, but this is rarely true. Individual stakeholders have their own (possibly competing) objectives. I am interested in the development of mathematical models that can represent these complex networks of stakeholders within mathematical abstractions that provide insight into competitive interactions and market forces (e.g., price behavior in competitive systems). Game theoretic approaches provide interesting ways of exploring these problems. Moreover, theoretical concepts from the field of economics provide guarantees about stakeholder behaviors in competitive models, such as revenue adequacy (also called cost recovery) which has been acknowledged as a key underlying principle in electricity markets that gives generators confidence in the performance of the algorithms used to operate markets.

Teaching Interests
My skills and background lend themselves to teaching courses in optimization and other mathematical concepts like process control and statistics. I possess the background knowledge to teach core courses in chemical engineering as well, including process systems, separations, and numerical methods. I look forward to integrating my research into courses where possible, either to provide meaningful examples, or as visual accompaniments for abstract concepts.

References
1. Tominac PA, Zhang W, Zavala VM. Spatio-Temporal Economic Properties of Multi-Product Supply Chains. In Review, 2021.
2. Ma J, Tominac P, Pfleger BF, Zavala VM. Infrastructures for Phosphorus Recovery from Livestock Waste using Cyanobacteria: Transportation, Techno-Economic, and Policy Implications. In Review, 2021.
3. Tominac P, Aguirre-Villegas H, Sanford J, Larson R, Zavala V. Evaluating landfill diversion strategies for municipal organic waste management using environmental and economic factors. ACS Sus Chem Eng, 2021; 9(1): 489{498. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.0c07784.
4. Tominac PA, Zavala VM. Economic properties of multi-product supply chains. Comput Chem Eng, 2021; 145: 107157. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compchemeng.2020.107157.
5. Tominac P, Mahalec V. A dynamic game theoretic framework for process plant competitive upgrade and production planning. AICHE J, 2018; 64(3): 916-925. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/aic.15995
6. Tominac P, Mahalec V. A game theoretic framework for petroleum refinery strategic production planning. AICHE J, 2017; 63(7): 2751-2763. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/aic.15644.
7. Grant D, Muller M, Tominac P, Guan L, Sask K, Brash J, Davies J. Significantly Reduced Burst Release by Sequestration of Protein Delivery Vehicle Within Unique Three-Phase Composite Scaffold for Bone Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine. Bone, 2010; (46): S24.