Operational impact on the environment: Managing service systems with environmental deterioration

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• 作者：Ye Shi^a ; ^{hecules@mail.ustc.edu.cn" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author} ; Yugang Yu^a ; ^{ygyu@ustc.edu.cn" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author} ; Lizhi Wang^b ; ^{lzwang@iastate.edu" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author}
• 关键词：Environment protection ; Service ; Deterioration
• 刊名：International Journal of Production Economics
• 出版年：2015
• 出版时间：December 2015
• 年：2015
• 卷：170
• 期：part_PA
• 页码：310-320
• 全文大小：608 K

文摘

We consider a dynamic environmental and marketing decision problem for natural service systems with environmental deterioration. Demand of the service is attracted by both the environmental quality and the marketing efforts, but customers also generate wastes that greatly degrade the environment. As a result, the manager of the service system may decide to make a cleaning up effort to help the environment recover in addition to its self-healing capability. The manager׳s objective is to maximize the net present value of the total profit over a planning horizon by determining both the environmental and marketing efforts in each period.

To show how the environment affects the operation, we characterize the monotonicity of optimal decisions w.r.t. the environmental quality. To investigate operational impact on the environment, we present a complete characterization of the steady-state environmental quality, and prove the global convergence of the environmental quality in the long run. The convergence result implies that the environment may gradually degrade over time. A case study is presented to show what can be done to control the degradation. An interesting finding is that the steady-state environmental quality may improve even if the average amount of wastes produced per customer increases.