Designing a resilient and green coal supply chain network under facility disruption and demand volatility

Few studies have addressed strategic-level disruptions and operational-level risks for the coal industry in the literature on mining supply chain management. In many developing countries, the coal industry plays a leading role in electric power generation and primarily contributes to carbon emissions. This study aims to design a resilient and green coal supply chain network (RG-CSCN) considering strategic-level disruptions, operational-level risks, and carbon emissions. A practical stochastic mixed-integer programming model is developed to optimise both economic and environmental objectives (i.e., the total network cost and the total carbon emissions cost). Our proposed model involves five resilience strategies: facility fortification, reserving emergency inventory, direct-to-port delivery, establishing reliable distribution centres, and multiple transportation routes. Based on real-world data from the coal industry, we conduct extensive computational experiments to evaluate the impacts of strategic-level disruptions and operational-level risks and to validate the applicability of the proposed five resilience strategies and their synergistic performance in coal supply chain management. Moreover, sensitivity analyses are carried out to examine the influences of different customer service levels and carbon tax policies in various scenarios.