A multi-objective Environmental Hedging Point Policy with customer satisfaction criteria

Recently, a new feedback control policy, named the Environmental Hedging Point Policy, to control the inventory and production was introduced. In this policy, inventory, backlog, and emission costs were taken into account. Employing low-emitting technology, this study aimed at developing this policy in order to integrate three objectives of costs, emissions, and customers' satisfaction. Two prominent environmental control rules, namely command-and-control and cap-and-trade were examined by applying the proposed policy. To solve the problem, a new simulation-based optimization method combining OptQuest, experimental design, variance analysis, and response surface methodology, was conducted. This method improved the procedure of finding the second-order responses. Compromise solutions of a multiple-response problem were calculated thanks to the desirability function approach. Accordingly, the Pareto optimal surface was generated by changes in the weights or shape factors. The effectiveness of introduced policy was examined by sensitivity analysis. Thereupon, the shadow prices for both low-emitting technology and emission penalty were obtained. The results showed that considering shadow prices imposed by the regulatory authorities, the cap-and-trade rule was more effective in comparison with other rules.