Game Theory Models Of The Biomass Supply Chain For Power Generation Integrating Rural Official Organizations

In the context of the energy revolution,energy conservation and emission reduction,China has been vigorously developing renewable energy including biomass power.However,the development of biomass power industry has not been smooth in recent years.The shortage of feedstock supply is a major barrier to its development,which,therefore,is a scientific issue worthy of study.Within China's current administration system,grassroots rural official organizations play an important role in rural economic activities.In our investigation,it was found that rural official organizations with villagers' committees as the mainstay have an important impact on the behavior of farmers.To the best of our knowledge,there are few previous studies examining the way of incorporating the organizations in the biomass feedstock supply chain for power generation.We propose a novel biomass supply method considering that incorporation.With this method,a biomass supply cooperative is established by the organizations and farmers who are organized by the organizations to harvest and deliver biomass collectively.The revenue from supplying biomass is used to improve local public welfare.In this paper,we build four game theory models of biomass supply chain for power generation with this novel method.The methodology of game theory combined with multi-agent modeling and simulation technology is employed to investigate the effectiveness and applicability of the novel method and to propose the corresponding implementation strategies.In order to compare the equilibriums with the novel and the two conventional supply methods,this study firstly builds game theory models with complete information combining Stackelberg game models and multi-agent modeling and simulation technology in the framework of non-cooperative game theory.We formulate three parallel game models on the interactions between players within the three supply methods.The monetary and non-monetary utilities of farmers and rural official organizations are considered in Cobb-Douglas formations.Based on the response functions derived from the equilibrium analyses,four categories of agents,including plants,brokers,farmers and rural official organizations,are constructed to exam the changing tendency of the equilibriums.The results demonstrate that the novel supply method can improve the overall utility of farmers,thereby increasing biomass supply and the profit of the power plant.The impacts of the feed-in tariff,transportation distance and utility preferences on equilibriums are investigated through sensitivity analyses.On the basis of the model above,we then develop a two-stage game model with complete information considering horizontal competition in the supply chain.The first stage is a Stackelberg game,in which players are interacting in the three different scenarios of competition,cooperation and co-opetition.We quantify the interrelationships and payoffs,with the equilibrium biomass supply and overall profit in the supply chain deduced.The derivative second stage describes the replicator dynamics between the two groups of farmers and rural official organizations whose evolutionary stable strategies are analyzed.Corresponding to the two stages,Monte Carlo and multi-agent simulation methods are used to investigate the changing tendency of equilibrium and the uncertainty of parameters,with the impacts of non-monetary utility and free rides emphasized in the latter method.The results show that the horizontal competition between the broker method and the rural official organization method makes the equilibrium biomass supply reach a higher level,and the profit of the power plant and the total profit of the entire supply chain can be increased.We hence propose a co-opetition strategy for the acquisition of biomass feedstock.The suggestions on the supply radius,the enthusiasm of villagers' committees and free rides prevention are made through sensitivity analyses.Cost is a key factor in the biomass supply chain management.However,power plants have asymmetric cost information on biomass suppliers.We further build a game theory model with incomplete cost information with a proposed dual-contract design incorporating price and quantity contracts.We compare the Bayesian Nash equilibriums in different contract scenarios through multi-agent modeling and simulation.The results indicate that the information asymmetry will affect the equilibrium of the supply market,where the biomass supply of the suppliers with lower costs is higher,and the increase of the proportion of high-cost suppliers will reduce the total supply.The proposed dual-contract strategy can further increase the total biomass supply and screen out the suppliers with lower costs.Through the sensitivity analysis,we make relevant suggestions in the implementation of that strategy.Benefit allocation is a core issue affecting whether the contracts have binding forces between participants.Shifting to another domain in game theory,we develop a two-stage cooperative game model.The first stage is a two-person bargaining game model formulating the breaking point between farmers and a villagers,committee and the utility functions considering non-monetary benefits.The second one is a coalition game model on farmers' cooperation,in which we build the characteristic functions and feasible benefit allocations based on Nash solution and a modified equal profit method.The results show that the benefit allocation strategy has better stability,fairness and operability,meeting the individual rationality and group rational constraints of farmers.The income of farmers will increase with the expansion of a cooperative scale.But when the scale reaches a certain limit,the relative advantage of the novel method tends to be stable.The sensitivity analysis shows that the strategy can achieve the increase of farmers' income with a lower feed-in tariff level,and has the applicability to different regions with different opportunity costs.Finally,we propose policy suggestions to promote the efficient and sustainable operation of the biomass supply chain and the entire biomass power generation industry.