Modelling of coal trade process for the logistics enterprise and its optimisation with stochastic predictive control

Abstract

In the paper, a typical coal trade process is described and modelled, where one logistics enterprise with blending equipments lies in the core and two types of common contracts are elucidated to define constraints. A mixed-integer model is built and featured by addressing contract violation, blending operation, real time price information and arbitrarily distributed stochastic demands. To deal with the stochastic demands, probabilistic constraints are formed. Accordingly, stochastic model predictive control (SM-PC) strategy with both receding horizon and decreasing horizon formulations is developed to handle the probabilistic constraints and exploit the value of newest price information. By solving a series of mixed-integer linear programs, optimal coal trade decisions for the logistics enterprise can be obtained, including procurement decision, selling decision and operational decision of the blending equipments. Thorough simulation experiments are carried out and compared under three different strategies, which interpret the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

A Co-Opetitive Automated Negotiation Model for Vertical Allied Enterprises Teams and Stakeholders

“…According to the characteristic of the allied team in ANT , Ta can be defined as a 12-tuple: where A = { Pa, La } is a set of member agents in the team; round-dependent price function p Ta can be represented as follows [ 39 ]: where denotes the quantity requested by Sa at the t- th round; if , if ; .…”

“…The Stakeholder enterprise entity is a large power & heating company in Guangzhou, which sooner or later replenishes coal for power generation, a power & heating company needs to replenish a quantity of coal of specifications at some costs (the unit calorific value should be between 6300 and 6400 Kcal, moreover, the volatile matter, total sulfur and moisture should be less than 14%, 0.9% and 8% respectively. The known conditions include that the distance is about 25,000 Km, and logistics cost has a considerable proportion in the cost of sales (at least 60% in the sale cost of coal according to the objective statistics [ 39 , 50 ])), and sends the request to the B2B electronic platform. To support the power & heating company, the B2B electronic platform groups a coal production enterprise and a professional logistics enterprise as an allied negotiation team in some ways ( the supply chain B2B electronic platform may find the team with some rules or strategies, in a process that might need qualified Production enterprise and Logistics enterprise to interact with each other and confirm the team formation), to negotiate with the power & heating company for making a supply contract or agreement.…”

Pozyskiwanie węgla kamiennego z uwzględnieniem wybranych regulacji środowiskowych – studium przypadku polskiego sektora energetycznego

“…Optimizing the supply and use of hard coal in the process of electricity production has already been the subject of many studies. The optimization problem was formulated from the perspective of the coal supplier (Kasana and Kumar 2004;Kozan and liu 2012;Blom et al 2019) the commercial intermediary (Cheng et al 2016;Amini et al 2022), and the consumers. The common point of the published works is an attempt to make management decisions in selling or purchasing raw material, following the adopted optimization criterion, which is most often maximizing profit (of a coal company or an intermediary), minimizing transport costs, or minimizing the cost of coal purchase by the recipient.…”