Zu-Jun Ma

• PhD
• Professor at Southwest Jiaotong University

The importance of closed-loop supply chains has been widely recognized in literature and in practice. The paper investigates interactions among the different parties in a three-echelon closed-loop supply chain consisting of a single manufacturer, a single retailer and two recyclers and focuses on how cooperative strategies affect closed-loop supply...

To quantify the efficiency of decentralized competitive reverse supply chains (RSCs) with quality-dependent price-only contracts, we characterize the worst-case efficiency loss with the price of anarchy (PoA). Several scenarios with unilateral or bilateral horizontal competition under push or pull configurations of RSCs are discussed. Given the unc...

In this paper, we propose five typical contracts to coordinate decentralized reverse supply chains with strategic recycling behavior of consumers. First, a reverse supply chain model with strategic recycling behavior of consumers is developed based on the classical newsvendor problem. Next, after analyzing the wholesale price contract, we find that...

Under the coexistence of “trade old for new” (TON) and “trade old for remanufactured” (TOR) programs, we study a firm’s optimal pricing decisions and identify the thresholds that determine whether the firm should offer TON and TOR simultaneously. The result shows that adopting two kinds of trade-ins simultaneously does not necessarily benefit the f...

The industrial sector accounts for 70% of the total energy-related CO2 emissions in China. To gain a better understanding of the changes in carbon intensity in China's industrial sector, this study first utilized logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) decomposition analysis to disentangle the carbon intensity into three influencing factors, includin...

Repair scheduling and routing and logistics support are interdependent and critical for post-disaster distribution system restoration (PDSR), which is also influenced by the geographical characteristics of outage area. Hence, we develop a co-optimization model for the PDSR with logistics support and geographical characteristics. A hybrid improved ba...

Applications of government subsidies to speed up consumer trade‐ins of used products can be commonly observed in practice. This paper studies the design of such trade‐in subsidy programs and aims to provide implementable insights for practice. In particular, we focus on two open problems in the literature, (i) how to optimally allocate the subsidy...

This study proposes a cooperative rich vehicle routing problem (CoRVRP) among three typical logistics providers in the last-mile logistics industry in rural areas. The problem is formulated based on the information fusion system and the ordering interface system, and it is solved by a proposed branch-price-and-cut algorithm. Based on the optimized...

Apiculture has gained worldwide interest because of its contributions to economic incomes and environmental conservation. In view of these, migratory beekeeping, as a high-yielding technique, is extensively adopted. However, because of the lack of an overall routing plan, beekeepers who follow the experiential migratory routes frequently encounter...

As observed in real world practices, trade-ins can be offered by either the manufacturer or the retailer. The party offering the trade-in program faces the trade-off between the fixed trade-in cost incurred and the additional revenue generated. By conducting a game-theoretic study, we analytically explore in this paper the optimal choice of trade-i...

Road network restoration in affected areas is critical for search and rescue, evacuation, and relief distribution after a natural disaster. However, the accomplishment of post–disaster road network repair (PDRNR) performed by repair crews depends on an effective and efficient logistics support scheduling (LSS). However, existing studies on PDRNR ha...

This paper measures the worst‐case efficiency of price‐only contracts in closed‐loop supply chains (CLSCs) with the price of anarchy (PoA). We model a single‐period Stackelberg game in which a manufacturer sells new products to a retailer and collects used products with exogenous retail price and collection price via three alternative reverse chann...

Firms usually offer trade-in programs to entice consumers to purchase next generation products. By considering the purchase behavior of both myopic consumers and strategic consumers, we propose a game-theoretic analytical model to determine the optimal price of the next generation products and the optimal trade-in rebate. We find that firm’s optima...

Large-scale sudden-onset disasters may cause massive injuries and thus place great pressure on the emergency blood supplies of local blood banks. When blood is in short supply, blood products gathered urgently to a local blood center should be appropriately allocated to blood banks in the affected area. Moreover, ABO/Rh(D) compatibilities among blo...

The multiple attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problem, in which both the attribute weights and the expert weights are correlated and the attribute values take the form of interval grey linguistic (IGL) variables, is investigated in this paper. First, based on the relative concepts of IGL variables and the operation rules between IGL variable...

This paper addresses a real-life delivery problem often encountered by urban perishable product deliverers, in which the providers suffer losses from failed delivery, such as product deterioration or violating customers’ time windows, especially when delivery orders accepted are beyond the providers’ delivery capacity. To the best of our knowledge,...

Index decomposition analysis (IDA) has been widely applied to study CO2 emissions from electricity generation. However, most have focused on emissions at the country level, less attention has been given to emissions at the regional level. To fill the gap, this study firstly utilized a Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) method to analyze the driv...

This study deals with the large-scale transnational high-speed railway construction evaluation problem, which is a major issue in implementing the Belt and Road (B&R) initiative. We proposed a method for the selection of the most urgent need for transnational high-speed railway construction in the B&R region, which was tested on massive experimenta...

This paper develops closed-loop supply chain models with alliance recycling under two financing systems for recycling used products, that is, pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) and recycling fund (RF). The primary goal behind analytic formulation is to investigate the differences between the two financing systems and determine which one performs better, and t...

This paper introduces the properties of inventory structure for both rescue and affected banks during blood shortage. An age-based transshipment model is developed, with two preference selection methods for transshipping blood units being presented. Compared to quantity-based policy, the age-based policy under first-in-first-transship is recommende...