A Petri net approach for green supply Chain network modeling and performance analysis

Abstract

Green supply chain has become a promising and challenging field during the last decade driven by rising environmental conscious business and governmental legislation. In this paper, we develop a Petri-net based model to describe the green supply chain and to evaluate the essential performance. Generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPN) are introduced to model the network of a general green supply chain with time characteristics. Performance analysis is carried out using the embedded Markov chain. Furthermore, we perform a comparison between green and normal supply chain to assert the superiority of the green supply chain in terms of profits. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.