Green production — Strategies and dynamics: A simulation based study

There are a number of issues for enterprises to implement green production. From operations perspective, selecting green improvement strategy is critical but difficult due to the fact that it affects not only green performance, but also production economy. Important trade-off exists between different objectives and decisions are subjected to dynamic and uncertain conditions. From system dynamics perspective, there exist multiple factors interacting with one another to drive system's behavior and the trade-offs. Decision makers need to evaluate different scenarios to find appropriate balance between strategies. We report studies addressing both issues through an integrated approach emphasizing the use of simulation. First it focused on the optimization of green improvement strategies. A simulation model was developed to capture operations flow and decision logic. A multi-objective genetic algorithm, combined with improving heuristics, was developed to search for best solutions. Secondly, system dynamic models were developed to characterize the dynamic behavior of production systems under Cap and Trade conditions. Simulation experiments were run to analyze the relationship between system states and among the factors that cause the state transitions that influence the overall system behavior.