Optimizing production of new energy vehicles with across-chain cooperation under China’s dual credit policy

New energy vehicles (NEVs) are becoming more and more prevalent for economic and environmental reasons. This paper investigates the issue of the impacts of subsidy policy and dual credit policy on NEVs and conventional vehicles (CVs) production decision from an across-chain perspective, in a co-opetitive context, where exists a CV supply chain and a NEV supply chain with two important schemes involved, i.e., government subsidies and dual credit. While previous literature has discussed government subsidies excessively, they seldom study the role of dual credit policy in promoting NEVs. To examine the differences between two schemes, a mixed integer linear programing (MILP) is utilized to develop a stylized production model for a CV supply chain and NEV supply chain system that incorporating subsidies and dual credit trading simultaneously. Using a Lagrange heuristic algorithm to provide an optimal solution regarding NEV and CV production decision as well as dual-credit trading. Simulations are performed on realistic profiles that show, (i) implementing the dual credit policy increases the profit of NEV supply chain, whereas the profit of CV supply chain and of whole supply chain system decline simultaneously, and the schedule of CVs/NEVs without across-chain cooperation is arranged more evenly than that with across-chain cooperation during the transit period to NEVs. Meanwhile, (ii) under dual credit policy, gradually-decreasing subsidies can partially offset the negative impacts of dual credit policy on the NEV supply chain, the subsidies can only serve as a temporary supplement to profits. In addition, (iii) there exists an optimal NEV credit price p∗ to maximize the overall profit of the whole system, and a corresponding threshold value of p∗ for two categories of cars, when above the threshold, the per-CV profit outperforms the per-NEV one and vice versa.