Joint Optimal Production Planning for Complex Supply Chains Constrained by Carbon Emission Abatement Policies

We focus on the joint production planning of complex supply chains facing stochastic demands and being constrained by carbon emission reduction policies. We pick two typical carbon emission reduction policies to research how emission regulation influences the profit and carbon footprint of a typical supply chain. We use the input-output model to capture the interrelated demand link between an arbitrary pair of two nodes in scenarios without or with carbon emission constraints. We design optimization algorithm to obtain joint optimal production quantities combination for maximizing overall profit under regulatory policies, respectively. Furthermore, numerical studies by featuring exponentially distributed demand compare systemwide performances in various scenarios. We build the “carbon emission elasticity of profit (CEEP)” index as a metric to evaluate the impact of regulatory policies on both chainwide emissions and profit. Our results manifest that by facilitating the mandatory emission cap in proper installation within the network one can balance well effective emission reduction and associated acceptable profit loss. The outcome that CEEP index when implementing Carbon emission tax is elastic implies that the scale of profit loss is greater than that of emission reduction, which shows that this policy is less effective than mandatory cap from industry standpoint at least.