Stackelberg-Nash Equilibrium for Integrated Gravelly Soil Excavation-Transportation-Distribution System in a Large-Scale Hydropower Construction Project

Abstract

During the last few decades because of the increasing interactions between the supply chain entities, supply chain management research has matured. However, there has been limited research focused on construction supply chain problems. This paper presents an excavation-distribution problem with two-stage transportation for a two-echelon gravelly soil supply chain in a large-scale hydropower construction project. In this problem, Stackelberg game behavior is used to deal with the complex interactions exhibited between the decision entities in a fuzzy random uncertain environment, and bilevel programming is adopted to find the Stackelberg-Nash equilibrium solution. Further, a novel three-level programming Stackelberg model is developed to examine the dynamic game behavior and complex interactions between the entities and to determine the Stackelberg-Nash equilibrium solution for a gravelly soil two-echelon supply chain. To deal with the uncertainties, a hybrid crisp approach and an expected value operator are used to convert the fuzzy random parameters to definitive parameters. To solve this novel Stackelberg model, a hybrid algorithm combined with interactive fuzzy programming techniques and two types of evolved particle swarm optimization algorithms are designed. The results and an analysis of a practical example at a large-scale hydropower project demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of the proposed model and optimization method.