Abstract
The growing interest in sustainable development is reflected in both the market’s sensitivity to environmental and social issues and companies’ interest in the opportunities that sustainable development objectives provide. SMEs, which account for most of the world’s pollution, have significant resource constraints for a sustainable development. Sharing their scarce resources can help them to overcome these constraints and to gain agility and organisational resilience against uncertainties, but the distrust inherent in belonging to different companies prevents them from sharing the necessary information for coordination purposes. This paper presents a coordination mechanism proposal with information asymmetry to allow independent companies’ resources to be sustainably shared as a technological driver. The proposed distributed coordination mechanism is compared to both a decentralised–uncoordinated and a centralised situation. The interest of the proposal is evaluated by a computer simulation experiment employing mathematical programming models with independent objectives in the Generic Materials and Operations Planning formulation with a rolling horizon procedure in different demand, uncertainty and product scenarios. Competitive improvement is identified for all members for their excess capacity use and their operations planning.
Highlights
María Jesús Muñoz-Torres andIn the last decade, corporate interest in green investments has considerably increased, because companies are concerned about resource efficiency and environmental issues [1]and the private sector’s commitment to collaborate [2]
This paper focuses on the proposal of coordination mechanisms for capacitated operations planning within a supply chain where decisions are made through mathematical programming models, and members distrust sharing all information
Uncertainty is simulated as a normal random variation [76] that focuses on the demand for each product during each rolling horizon replanning period
Summary
Corporate interest in green investments has considerably increased, because companies are concerned about resource efficiency and environmental issues [1]. This article contributes to shedding some light on designing and understanding a coordination mechanism that addresses lack of research attention to sustainability in SMEs. This article addresses the research question of a proposed coordination mechanism for distributed collaborative operation planning between independent companies to share resources with asymmetric information and to face demand uncertainty to outperform an uncoordinated situation and a centralised situation towards sustainable development. The coordination mechanism uses the convergence of Lagrangian multipliers that are updated by the subgradient method This approach is applied to an extensive test bed that represents a cluster of companies with no prevailing power that voluntarily decide to share the capacity of one of their resources, e.g., transport or batch processing ovens (welding, annealing, vulcanisation, etc.), towards a more sustainable supply chain. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: firstly, an introduction to the coordination mechanism is presented; secondly, the research methodology is followed; thirdly, the proposed coordination mechanism is applied with GMOP formulation; fourthly, some numerical experiments are performed, and the results are discussed; some conclusions and future works are provided
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