Zarządzanie decyzjami o zamknięciu produkcji: Perspektywa odpowiedzialności społecznej
[Managing shutdown decisions in merchant commodity production: A social commerce 
perspective]

Stein-Erik Fleten (Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management,
NTNU, Trondheim, Norway)  


Merchant commodity/energy production assets operate in markets with volatile prices 
and exchange rates. Plant closures often adversely affect the parent company and the 
local community. We study if mitigating these effects is financially viable by 
designing two types of policies that delay or avoid a plant closure. Our social 
commerce perspective towards managing shutdown decisions deviates from the commonly 
used asset value maximization objective in merchant operations. The first policy 
is grounded in anticipated regret theory and determined using approximate dynamic 
programming (ADP), while the second extends production margin-based heuristics used 
in practice and is computed using ADP and binary classification. Our operating 
policies significantly delay/avoid shutdowns for small asset value losses on real 
aluminum production instances.

Based on:
A.Trivella, S.Nadarajah, S.-E.Fleten, D.Mazieres and D.Pisinger (2018) Managing 
shutdown decisions in merchant commodity and energy production: A social commerce 
perspective. Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3034869