Urban food waste management with multi-agent participation: A combination of evolutionary game and system dynamics approach

Abstract

Food waste can meet diverse demand if treated harmlessly while may bring severe environmental problems if managed improperly. China is currently trying to facilitate food waste harmless disposal and resource utilization by urban food waste management. However, conflicts of interest among government departments, restaurants and waste disposal companies often make it difficult to achieve effective urban food waste management. This paper conducts a theoretical modeling and simulation analysis of behavioral strategy interaction of the above three participants by a combination of evolutionary game and system dynamics approach. To avoid opportunistic behaviors and regulation inefficiency that occurred in fixed penalty scheme (F-scheme), we introduce random inspection penalty scheme (R-scheme) to the tripartite evolutionary game in urban food waste management. Then an in-depth scenario analysis under F-scheme and R-scheme is carried out to investigate the influences of key variables on strategy evolution of participants. The results indicate that, compared with F-scheme, R-scheme contributes to both system stability promotion and practicality enhancement. Food waste treatment fee and regulation cost are influencing factors that respectively affect the strategic choices of restaurants and government departments. To a certain extent, exposure probability that represents informal regulation of the public and NGO can improve urban food waste management. Therefore, it is critical for government departments to adopt R-scheme, take advantage of the informal regulation of the public and NGO, gradually reduce food waste treatment fee and maintain a reasonable regulation cost to improve urban food waste management, thereby promoting food waste harmless disposal and resource utilization.