Optimization and coordination of South-to-North Water Diversion supply chain with strategic customer behavior

The South-to-North Water Diversion (SNWD) Project is a significant engineering project meant to solve water shortage problems in North China. Faced with market operations management of the water diversion system, this study defined the supply chain system for the SNWD Project, considering the actual project conditions, built a decentralized decision model and a centralized decision model with strategic customer behavior (SCB) using a floating pricing mechanism (FPM), and constructed a coordination mechanism via a revenue-sharing contract. The results suggest the following: (1) owing to water shortage supplements and the excess water sale policy provided by the FPM, the optimal ordering quantity of water resources is less than that without the FPM, and the optimal profits of the whole supply chain, supplier, and external distributor are higher than they would be without the FPM; (2) wholesale pricing and supplementary wholesale pricing with SCB are higher than those without SCB, and the optimal profits of the whole supply chain, supplier, and external distributor are higher than they would be without SCB; and (3) considering SCB and introducing the FPM help increase the optimal profits of the whole supply chain, supplier, and external distributor, and improve the efficiency of water resources usage.