Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research

This paper studies a periodic-review production-inventory control model under an energy buy-back program over an infinite planning horizon, in which a fixed setup cost and compensation levels corresponding to various market states are involved. The objective is to identify the manufacturer’s optimal production-inventory policy that can minimize his total discounted cost or long-run average cost. By using Veinott’s conditions, it is shown that such a state dependent optimal policy is of either an $(s^i,S)$, or partly an $(s^0,S,A)$ type.

In view of the structural advantage of second-order composed derivatives, the purpose of this paper is to analyze quantitatively the behavior of perturbation maps for the first time by using this concept. First, new concepts of the second-order composed adjacent derivative and the second-order composed lower Dini derivative are introduced. Some relationships among the second-order composed contingent derivative, the second-order composed adjacent derivative and the second-order composed lower Dini derivative are discussed. Second, the relationships between second-order composed lower Dini derivable and Aubin property are provided. Third, by virtue of second-order composed contingent derivatives and the above relationships, some results concerning second-order sensitivity analysis are established without the assumption of the locally Lipschitz property or the locally Hölder continuity. Finally, we give some complete characterizations of second-order composed contingent derivatives of the perturbation maps.

Carbon emissions reduction has become a frequently discussed topic in industry and academia. However, how can reduction effects be enhanced with dominant brand and downstream manufacturer? This paper incorporates emissions reduction into a green supply chain which considers consumers’ low-carbon preference behavior and government intensity regulations, in order to discuss the impacts of consumers’ environmental awareness and government constraints on optimal emissions reduction and profit, respectively. The paper first constructs three reduction models on the basis of reality: independent reduction by manufacturer, contractual reduction by brand and collaborative reduction by both. Then it concludes the optimal decisions and compare the models. The results show that both the profits and emissions reduction will be decreased with the strengthened carbon intensity constraint, but the cost-sharing contract can mitigate this negative effect on dominant brand and society. Meanwhile, the acceptable range of cost-sharing ratio will be smaller with a lower cost coefficient of emissions reduction and a higher consumers’ preference. Furthermore, government should design the incentive method or regulate the carbon market to improve the social welfare level. Lastly, a numerical study is conducted, the impact of several key factors on supply chain performance and model selection are presented for management decisions.

This paper examines the impact of electricity reforms on the technical efficiency of the power distribution sector in India, using state-level panel data for the period 1995–2012. We use a two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA), where DEA efficiency estimates obtained in the first stage are regressed on policy reform variables and some external environmental variables in the second-stage analysis. The bootstrap method is applied to analyze the statistical properties of the nonparametric estimates. First, we find that the partially unbundled structure of the electricity industry, where generation and distribution sectors are integrated but the transmission sector is separate, had significant positive impact on the technical efficiency of the distribution sector. Second, our result indicates that the legislation of electricity reforms had a significantly negative effect on technical efficiency. Third, we find that small-sized electricity distribution sectors/states experienced significant positive gain in technical efficiency when interacted with partial or full unbundling.

In a dual-channel supply, the manufacturer sells the products by both a traditional channel via the retailer and an online channel directly. Comparing with the direct channel, the retailer may provide additional services to the traditional channel. This paper studies the quantity leadership for a dual-channel supply chain with retail service. The manufacturer decides the wholesale price of the products and its selling quantity via the online channel, and the retailer decides the service level and its selling quantity via the traditional channel. We consider three Cournot competition games: Manufacturer-as-leader game, retailer-as-leader game, and simultaneous game. Optimal solutions are derived for these games. Based on the optimal solutions, we investigate the quantity leadership/followership decisions for the manufacturer and retailer, associated with the changes of some parameters. We observe that when the service sensitivity parameters are low, being a follower is a dominant strategy for the retailer; otherwise, both strategies of manufacturer-as-leader (retailer as the follower) and retailer-as-leader (manufacturer as the follower) are Nash equilibriums. We further conduct the numerical studies to investigate the impacts of parameters related to the retail service, and discuss the insights of the findings.

In this paper, we not only develop a Stackelberg game to capture the unique characteristics of the ocean freight transportation, but also employ a screening model to address the contracting issue between one carrier and one freight forwarder under asymmetric information. The freight forwarder faces random demand from multiple shippers. In our framework, the spot price is positively correlated with the shippers’ demand. We first derive the forwarder’s optimal strategy, and then formulate the carrier’s contract design problem under symmetric and asymmetric information. Subsequently, we fully characterize the equilibrium parameters for a two-part tariff contract. The numerical experiments conducted thereafter reveal that (i) under a higher correlation between the shippers’ demand and the spot price, the carrier prefers a lower purchase price and the forwarder orders more through a contract in the peak seasons; (ii) when the market demand is extremely volatile, the carrier should raise the purchase price and the forwarder should order more through a contract; and (iii) with a higher degree of information asymmetry, the carrier prefers a higher purchase price while the forwarder relies more on the spot market than the contract market.

The yard crane (YC) scheduling problem is studied for a new terminal design, known as the Ground Trolley-based Automated Container Terminal (GT-ACT). At the operational level, the YC scheduling problem considering GT could be formalized as job sequencing. The cooperative operation of the twin YCs, GT and the transport vehicles is complicated, a small change in the operation sequence may cause a chain reaction, which could overthrow the partial sequence preferred previously. A hybrid algorithm based on the nested partition (NP) framework is proposed. The ant colony (AC) algorithm is combined in the method for solution construction, while genetic algorithm (GA) is used for the perturbation and backtrack purposes. Experiments show the hybrid method is effective for practical problems under different scales. The AC and GA algorithms play an important role in improving the optimization.

Recent developments of information technology have increased market’s competitive pressure and products’ prices turned to be paramount factor for customers’ choices. These challenges influence traditional revenue management models and force them to shift from quantity-based to price-based techniques and incorporate individuals’ decisions within optimization models during pricing process. Multinomial logit model is the simplest and most popular discrete choice model, which suffers from an independence of irrelevant alternatives limitation. Empirical results demonstrate inadequacy of this model for capturing choice probability in the itinerary share models. The nested logit model, which appeared a few years after the multinomial logit, incorporates more realistic substitution pattern by relaxing this limitation. In this paper, a model of game theory is developed for two firms which customers choose according to the nested logit model. It is assumed that the real-time inventory levels of all firms are public information and the existence of Nash equilibrium is demonstrated. The firms adapt their prices by market conditions in this competition. The numerical experiments indicate decreasing firm’s price level simultaneously with increasing correlation among alternatives’ utilities error terms in the nests.