A two-stage scheduling strategy integrated with Stackelberg game approach to coordinate seaport logistics operation and energy management

Abstract

Existing studies overlook the interest conflict of different entities in the seaport logistics-energy coordination optimization and have difficulty in obtaining Nash equilibrium solutions in the games on seaport energy considering discrete logistics scheduling, which results in impractical operation strategies and poor economic performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel two-stage scheduling strategy integrated with Stackelberg game approach. In the first stage, the port authority determines the logistics operation plans for the incoming ships. In the second stage, a Stackelberg game model based on demand response program is formulated to depict the energy interaction between port authority and shipowners with restriction of first-stage decisions. To solve the bilevel nonlinear Stackelberg game in a centralized way, the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions, strong duality theory and big-M method are applied and the Stackelberg game model is transformed into a mixed-integer linear programming problem. Compared to the conventional model, the proposed strategy leads to the decrease of 6% in the energy cost of port authority and the average increase of 29.3% in the energy payoff of shipowners. The simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy has better performance in improving the economic benefits of port authority and shipowners.