Blockchain adoption or contingent sourcing? Advancing food supply chain resilience in the post-pandemic era

In the post-pandemic era, food supply chains and firms therein are facing unprecedented severe challenges, because once infection is detected, numerous products must be recalled or abandoned, and both suppliers and retailers in the supply chain suffer enormous loss. To survive under the pandemic, retailers have adopted different sourcing strategies, such as contingent sourcing, which, in turn, affect the upstream suppliers and hence the resilience of the whole supply chain. With the rapid development of digital technologies, retailers nowadays can utilize blockchain as a reliable and efficient way to reduce product risk and hence advance the resilience of food supply chains by improving product traceability and inspection accuracy, and making sourcing transparent. In this paper, we develop a game-theoretic model to investigate the interrelation between the retailer’s decisions on blockchain adoption and sourcing strategies. We consider that a retailer originally orders from a risky supplier while conducting an imperfect inspection to detect infected products before selling. The retailer may speculatively keep on ordering from the risky supplier or adopt contingent sourcing by ordering from an alternative safe supplier. The retailer also has an option to implement blockchain to improve the inspection accuracy and product traceability. We derive the optimal retail prices under different sourcing strategies with and without blockchain adoption and then analyze the incentives for sourcing strategy and blockchain adoption. Then, we identify the conditions of an all-win situation for food retailer, supplier, supply chain resilience, and consumers with/without government subsidy. Finally, we extend to consider the situation that some consumers have health-safety concerns and preferences for blockchain adoption.     

考虑通关水平的跨境物流服务供应链契约协调机制研究

为实现跨境物流服务供应链完全协调,运用Stackelberg博弈理论,构建由一个跨境物流服务供应商与一个物流服务集成商组成的二级供应链。采用因子分析法测度通关水平,分析通关水平对跨境物流服务供应链最优决策及协调运作的影响,设计可供跨境物流服务供应链完美协调的契约机制。研究表明,考虑通关水平使跨境物流服务供应链成员及供应链整体利润均得到提升;集中决策下跨境物流服务供应链整体利润总是高于分散决策;收益共享契约可实现跨境物流服务供应商及供应链整体决策的帕累托优化,但不能达到供应链的完全协调,而Nash协商改进的二部定价契约模型可实现供应链的完全协调。     

随机产出下合作社型农产品供应链容纳能力与结构研究

针对我国农产品产销存在的因农户和合作社分散林立、混乱竞争而造成的农产品供应链成员利益受损等问题,建立了由企业主导的“农户+合作社+企业”型三级农产品供应链竞争博弈模型。在求解出水平Cournot数量竞争和纵向Stackelberg博弈均衡解的基础上,提出3种农户容量选择策略,并进一步探讨了下游成员参与博弈的竞争空间和供应链容纳能力。结果表明：合作社利润最优策略优于社会福利最优策略,供应链总利润最优策略在一定区间范围内优于合作社最优策略;下游成员参与博弈的竞争空间存在上界组合和下界组合,且上界组合是农产品供应链的均衡结构,也是供应链的最大容纳能力;合作社利润最优策略使企业有更大的竞争空间,社会福利最优策略使合作社具有更大的竞争空间。     

风险规避对制造商开通直销渠道的影响

研究了风险规避对制造商开通直销渠道的影响。运用博弈论中个人理性和激励相容原则建立单渠道和双渠道供应链需求模型,得出均衡情况下供应链各成员的最优决策及社会福利。研究发现,仅当决策者风险规避度和直销渠道销售成本满足一定条件时,制造商开通直销渠道有利可图;且直销渠道并非总侵蚀零售商效用。当决策者风险规避度较大且直销渠道成本适中时,供应链价值减少。社会福利总随着制造商风险规避度的增大呈现先减少后增加的趋势。     

考虑品牌推广补贴的农产品供应链收益共享契约

龙头企业单方进行农产品品牌推广的动力不足。据此,考虑政府对龙头企业进行品牌推广提供财政补贴,建立政府和供应链成员的序贯博弈模型,求解出最优补贴比例和推广努力水平。在此基础上,研究了促成农产品供应链协调的两级农产品供应链收益共享契约。研究表明,政府补贴能够同时改善供应链绩效和社会福利,但是政府提供补贴下单纯的收益共享契约不能促成农产品供应链协调,而基于推广成本分担的收益共享契约能够促成农产品供应链协调。     

政府规制对电器电子产品闭环供应链决策的影响分析

为了分析政府规制对采用不同回收模式的电器电子产品闭环供应链(CLSC)决策的影响,在政府规制和无政府规制两种情形下,分别建立了制造商回收模式、销售商回收模式以及第三方回收企业回收模式的电器电子产品闭环供应链决策模型。通过对比政府规制前后不同回收模式下CLSC各成员的最优决策和收益,发现无论政府规制与否,只要制造商的单位回收成本不是非常高,制造商回收模式都对它自身更有利,否则制造商最好将回收活动外包给销售商。而销售商和第三方回收企业都希望自己从事回收活动。此外,政府规制下销售商回收模式对全社会更有利。     

New flexibility drivers for manufacturing,supply chain and service operations

Increasing product proliferation, customisation, competition and customer expectations, as well as supply side disruptions, pose significant challenges to firm operations. Such challenges require improved efficiency and resilience in manufacturing, service and supply chain systems. New and innovative flexibility concepts and models offer a prospective route to such operational improvements. Several emerging issues in flexibility, such as risk and uncertainty management, environmental sustainability, optimal strategies under competition, optimal operations with strategic consumer behaviours are being examined in this regard. This overview provides a concise review of these critical research issues, and discusses related papers featured in this special issue. Four major flexibility drivers are classified: disruption risks, resilience and the ripple effect in the supply chain; digitalisation, smart operations and e-supply chains; sustainability and closed-loop supply chains; and supplier integration and behavioural flexibility.     

物流服务供应链质量监控行为博弈分析

研究了物流服务供应商和集成商之间的质量监控博弈行为,分析双方的行为对物流服务质量的影响,从而提升物流服务质量。在两级物流服务供应链结构模型的基础上,构建了多级复杂物流服务供应链模型,运用博弈论方法分别给出了不同模型下的混合Nash均衡解,并考虑长期利益情况,得出模型的新Nash均衡解。结果表明,加强集成商的监督力度以及增加供应商之间的竞争等具体措施都可以显著改善物流服务供应链的质量监控和协调。     

Operation management of green ports and shipping networks: overview and research opportunities

Global ports and maritime shipping networks are important carriers for global supply chain networks, but they are also the main sources of energy consumption and pollution. To limit ship emissions in ports and offshore areas, the International Maritime Organization, as well as some countries, has issued a series of policies. This study highlights the importance and necessity of investigating emergent research problems in the operation management of green ports and maritime shipping networks. Considerable literature related to this topic is reviewed and discussed. Moreover, a comprehensive research framework on green port and shipping operation management is proposed for future research opportunities. The framework mainly comprises four research areas related to emission control and grading policies. This review may provide new ideas to the academia and industry practitioners for improving the performance and efficiency of the operation management of green ports and maritime shipping networks.     

Scheduling of recovery actions in the supply chain with resilience analysis considerations

Supply chain engineering models with resilience considerations have been mostly focused on disruption impact quantification within one analysis layer, such as supply chain design or planning. Performance impact of disruptions has been typically analysed without scheduling of recovery actions. Taking into account schedule recovery actions and their duration times, this study extends the existing literature to supply chain scheduling and resilience analysis by an explicit integration of the optimal schedule recovery policy and supply chain resilience. In particular, we compute a schedule optimal control policy and analyse the performance of this policy by varying the perturbation vector and representing the outcomes of variations in the form of an attainable set. We propose a scheduling model that considers the coordination of recovery actions in the supply chain. Further, we suggest a resilience index by using the notion of attainable sets. The attainable sets are known in control theory; their calculation is based on the schedule control model results and the minimax regret approach for continuous time parameters given by intervals. We show that the proposed indicator can be used to estimate the impact of disruption and recovery dynamics on the achievement of planned performance in the supply chain.     

低碳背景下政府财税行为对制造商决策影响

补贴与碳税是我国政府在践行碳减排过程中常见的策略之一。基于消费者和生产者剩余理论下,建立了以社会总福利为目标函数的模型,比较了政府不同财税政策下的补贴与碳税政策。分析了政府补贴与碳税对高碳产品和低碳产品制造商决策的影响,同时对比分析了不同情况下两种产品的均衡价格、均衡需求、均衡收益以及社会总福利。研究表明,无论政府采用哪种策略,社会总福利均会增加,但政府采用只向生产低碳产品的制造商进行补贴的策略,比只向生产高碳产品的制造商碳税的策略达到的社会总福利的效果要好,而综合考虑碳税和补贴的策略比前两种策略要好。     

Resilience strategies for sustainable supply chains under budget constraints in the post COVID-19 era

The COVID-19 outbreak has caused uncertainty risk surges, increased sustainable supply chain vulnerabilities, and challenges to sustainable supply chain resilience (SSCR) management. Therefore, improving SSCR is necessary to alleviate vulnerabilities, and SSCR management must generate large capital investments. However, the economic downturn brought about by the COVID-19 epidemic has made some companies have limited budgets that can be used to improve SSCR. Therefore, the design of resilience solutions needs to fully consider the constraints of budgetary costs. Most of the existing related literature only discusses optimal resilience solutions under certain cost constraints, so such resilience solutions cannot be applied to most enterprises. In this study, we set the cost constraint as a variable quantity, using resilience efficiency and customer satisfaction as indicators, to determine the changing laws of optimal resilience strategies when cost constraints change. These rules can be applied to enterprises with different budgeted costs. Our findings suggest that companies should prioritize sacrificing resilience measures (RMs) related to adaptive capacity when budget costs gradually decline, and RMs related to absorptive capacity are indispensable at all budget levels. Furthermore, the pursuit of environmental and social sustainability cannot be abandoned, no matter how limited the flexible budget may be.     

Digitalization for supply chain resilience and robustness: The roles of collaboration and formal contracts

Black swan events such as the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak cause substantial supply chain disruption risks to modern companies. In today’s turbulent and complex business environment, supply chain resilience and robustness as two critical capabilities for firms to cope with disruptions have won substantial attention from both the academia and industry. Accordingly, this study intends to explore how digitalization helps build supply chain resilience and robustness. Adopting organizational information processing theory, it proposes the mediating effect of supply chain collaboration and the moderating effect of formal contracts. Using survey data of Chinese manufacturing firms, the study applied structural equation modelling to test the research model. Results show that digitalization has a direct effect on supply chain resilience, and supply chain collaboration can directly facilitate both resilience and robustness. Our study also indicates a complementary mediating effect of supply chain collaboration on the relationship between digitalization and supply chain resilience and an indirect-only mediation effect on the relationship between digitalization and supply chain robustness. Findings reveal the differential roles of digitalization as a technical factor and supply chain collaboration as an organizational factor in managing supply chain disruptions. Paradoxically, formal contracts enhance the relationship between digitalization and supply chain resilience but weaken the relationship between supply chain collaboration and supply chain resilience. The validation of moderating effects determines the boundary conditions of digitalization and supply chain collaboration and provides insights into governing supply chain partners’ behavior. Overall, this study enhances the understanding on how to build a resilient and robust supply chain.     

On the quantification of operational supply chain resilience

Operational disruptions impact a supply chain’s ability to match supply and demand. To remain competitive, supply chains need to be resilient and thus capable of rapidly and effectively recovering from operational disruptions. Supply chain resilience is inherently multidimensional, as it spans across multiple tiers, and thus is difficult to quantify. Extant research has measured the transient response through a single-dimension or single-organisation as a proxy for operational resilience. Whilst this greatly simplifies the analysis, it is also potentially misleading, as an erroneous selection of metric(s) may lead to an inaccurate evaluation of the transient response. This research extends the understanding of operational resilience via quantitative evaluation of multiple transient response measures across multiple tiers; the objective being to construct a multidimensional, multi-echelon operational supply chain resilience metric. The study utilises disruptions as experimental inputs for a serial supply chain simulation model; results are obtained for individual measurements of the transient response across multiple supply chain tiers. Analysis indicates that individual dimensions of resilience can adequately explain the transient response at the single-firm level, whilst aggregation of multiple resilience dimensions across multiple tiers has greater capacity to holistically capture the performance response to supply chain disruptions.     

基于政府财政干涉的绿色供应链销售渠道模型

以博弈论为基本方法,研究了基于政府财政干涉的绿色供应链销售渠道模型问题。以制造商为市场领导者,构建了单一销售渠道和混合销售渠道的绿色供应链决策模型,通过对决策模型的分析,给出供应链成员的最优绿色度、批发价合同和利润,发现政府的财政干涉能激励供应链成员进行绿色产品的研发工作,且在混合策略下供应链的收益最大。最后通过算例分析验证了以上结论。     

Supply chain risk and resilience: theory building through structured experiments and simulation

The research literature of supply chain risk and resilience is at a critical developmental stage. Studies have established the importance of these topics both to researchers and practitioners. They also have identified factors contributing to risk, the impact of risk and disruptions on performance, and the strategies and tactics used to build the capacity for supply chain resilience. Although these efforts can provide support for constructing a theory of risk and resilience, researchers are currently restricted in their ability to build such a theory by the difficulty of collecting the necessary data. This paper contributes to this literature development effort by summarising prior research reviews and developing a three-component framework aimed at helping researchers to build better theories. This is accomplished through combining structured experimental design with discrete-event simulations of supply chains. The result is a methodology that allows researchers to develop better understanding of the factors that link a disruption to its impact on supply chain performance through both direct and interaction effects. Following the methodology development, the paper concludes with an example using the factors of shock interarrival time, supply chain connectivity and buffer stocks to illustrate the potential for contributing to the theory-building process.     

基于第三方物流服务提供商的供应链系统集成

分析了目前供应链集成面临的现状,提出基于第三方物流服务提供商的供应链系统集成策略.借助于网络与信息技术,研究了第三方物流服务提供商进入供应链系统的切入方案,以及基于网络协作实现制造商、供应商及分销商集成的方法.     

From waste to value – a system dynamics model for strategic decision-making in closed-loop supply chains

Although the field of closed-loop supply chain management has attracted a lot of attention in recent years and the management of reverse logistics processes has become a major field of supply chain management, there is still a lack of research conducting analyses using a comprehensive approach that takes the complexity of problems of reverse logistics processes into account. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to develop a model that allows an original equipment manufacturer in the electronics industry to test different value recovery strategies for business-to-business products in a closed-loop supply chain setting. For this purpose system dynamics is used because this approach enables one to capture the high complexity of reverse logistics processes and is suitable, contrary to traditional optimisation approaches, for analysing the dynamic behaviour of closed-loop supply chains comprehensively. The simulation analysis identifies leverage points for the improvement of decisions concerning reverse logistics. In particular, the simulation runs conducted highlight the high complexity and connectivity inherited with various value recovery processes. The paper contributes to a better understanding of supply chain dynamics, the impact of product backflow, and reverse logistics.     

支持敏捷供应链重构的模块化Petri网建模与分析

建立了敏捷供应链重构的过程框架，将敏捷供应链的重构分为结构重构和运行策略重构两个方面，结构重构主要是有关供应链节点的选择与评价过程，策略重构是在供应链结构形式以后，对其各节点的库存，物流、供货等策略的控制，在结构重构中采用模块化的Petri网建模方法进行分析，并以一虚拟的供应链为例进行仿真