Trade credit or credit insurance? A green supply chain finance design scheme with multi-objective programming

Abstract

Classical supply chain finance (SCF) primarily focuses on the financial service among all upstream and downstream supply chain participants. Due to the continuously deteriorating of the ecological environment, an environmental-friendly SCF system is urgently needed. In this paper, we propose a novel SCF design scheme with environmental concerns, i.e., green supply chain finance (GSCF), consider the financing channels both from banks and from consumers, and design a bi-objective optimization model that depicts the trade-off between the benefit and the emission. Further, an improved normalized normal constraint (INNC) Pareto method is developed to address the optimal financing strategy of the bi-objective model. We then conduct a numerical case of a Taiwanese steel firm to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Results show that our model provides a portfolio of optimal solutions on Pareto frontier which can be applied as an effective decision support system when designing a GSCF. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis also presents the impact of environmental investment cost, technological ratio of companies and the interest rate of trade credit on the optimal configuration of the GSCF.