Abstract
The undersupplies of feedstock and high costs have hindered the development of China’s biomass power generation. In this paper, the noncooperative game, farmer–broker cooperative game, and broker–biomass power plant cooperative game, under government incentives, are constructed and analyzed. The optimal decision strategies and profits for these three cases are obtained, while numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are conducted, aiming at illustrating some specific features of the games. It is shown that the government plays a critical role in the development of utilizing agribiomass for power generation and can work better in cooperative games. In addition, both agribiomass supply quantity and profits of supply chain members are higher in cooperative than in noncooperative game. Meanwhile, farmers can get the maximum profit in the broker–biomass power plant cooperative game, while biomass power plant makes the maximum profit in the farmer–broker cooperative game. To guide the healthy development of the industry, there is an urgent need for further exploration of the biomass supply chain management and coordination issue. Specifically, the cooperative game for establishing optimal feedstock price subsidy policy will be done by way of adjusting government incentives and alliance profit distribution.
Highlights
As rich and sustainable renewable transportation energy, agribiomass has gained wide attention in the recent past due to its advantages
Denotes P2 (CNY/ton) the unit price that the biomass power plant offers to the broker, Pgb (CNY/ton) the broker’s unit purchasing incentive from government, Q2 the quantity of agribiomass provided by the broker, CS (CNY/ton) the unit agribiomass storage cost, CT2 (CNY/ton) the unit agribiomass transportation cost, and θ the loss ratio caused by storage in the biomass storage station
A farmer–broker cooperative structure and a broker–biomass power plant cooperative structure are applied in the biomass supply chain to determine whether both players can obtain optimal decision strategy and increase their profit if they form an alliance
Summary
As rich and sustainable renewable transportation energy, agribiomass has gained wide attention in the recent past due to its advantages. This has created a thirst to establish a contractual relationship between biomass supply chain members that would have positive impact on the brokers’ behavior to realize efficient management and coordination of the biomass supply chain With these considerations in mind, the overall goal of this paper is to apply game theory of incentive effects for agribiomass power generation supply chain in China, and introduce the noncooperative game model, the farmer–broker cooperative game model, and the broker–biomass power plant cooperative game model into the biomass supply chain to analyze how the game modes work, through comparing the decision strategies and the profits of biomass supply chain members change.
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