Developing a joint supply chain plan for the coal industry considering conflict resolution strategies

Abstract

An integrated coordination planning problem pertaining to the energy enterprise aims to balance the plans submitted by the production and distribution branches to mitigate the conflict between them. The conception of this research comes from the challenges encountered in practice in the energy industry. Practical experience indicates that conflicts occur commonly among the respective plans made by the production and distribution branches. A plan coordinating approach is proposed that considers two aspects: maximizing company profit and minimizing the gap between the proposed plans and the coordinating ones that implement a conflict resolution approach. We apply genetic algorithm to handle this nonlinear optimization problem. A case study of the world's largest coal supplier in China shows that if conflicts occur in the original plans, the most effective method is to adjust the original plans from a global perspective, which has a strong relationship with the overall interests. The proposed model can effectively neutralize the secondary in uences of the conflict.