Carbon emissions Inventory Games

Abstract

Carbon emissions reduction has been the center of attention in many organizations during the past few decades. Many international entities developed rules and regulations to monitor and control carbon emissions especially under supply chain context. Furthermore, researchers investigated techniques and methods on how reduce carbon emissions under operational adjustment which can be done by cooperation or coordination. The main contribution of this thesis is to measure to what extend cooperation can contribute to carbon emissions. Many research addresses the advantage of cooperation in reducing cost. However, there isn't a plenty of research addressing the effect of cooperation on carbon emissions when the incentive of the cooperation is to reduce cost only. The aim of this thesis is to show if joint replenishment leads to a reduction in carbon emissions and this to be considered as an advantage to be added to cooperation. Moreover, if a savings occur from cooperation, the aim will be to address the issue of allocating the savings among parties engaged in the coalition. The thesis methodology adapted and extended cooperative EOQ model and basic inventory model (EOQ) in order to formulate and build an adjusted model to measure carbon emissions. The adjusted model will be used to calculate carbon emission in centralized and decentralized systems with incentives to reduce cost and no incentives to reduce emission. The calculation shall yield the optimum ordering quantity which in turn yields the savings between the two systems. Finally core allocation principles will be leveraged to propose a fair allocation of savings. Furthermore, the model will be extended to consider some regulation and different environments to which it will cater for carbon-tax regulation and full Truckload system contexts. Findings indicate that applying inventory game theory leads to a reduction of carbon emissions along with cost. Additionally, the total carbon emissions in centralized system will always be less then decentralized system under all conditions. Moreover, the proposed proportional allocation which was proven to be a core allocation model will be based on the frequency of ordering and the amount of holding emissions.