Optimisation of an enterprise's production technology upgrade strategy under a carbon tax: pay the tax or an upgrade fee?

摘要

Carbon tax is one of the important policy levers used to reduce CO2 emissions. When an enterprise is subject to a carbon tax, it has to balance the trade-off between the 'long-term tax fee' and the 'short-term upgrade fee'. In this research, we explore how to optimise an enterprise's production technology upgrade strategy based on existing low-carbon technologies, to minimise the total upgrade cost subject to an expected total cost per product. We propose an integer programming model to formulate the problem, and present a 'multi-agent system-genetic algorithm' (MAS-GA) method for its solution. The model is applied to a numerical example and the results indicate that the MAS-GA method is feasible.