Modelling the green supply chain of hotels based on front-back stage decoupling: perspective of ant colony labour division

To face the challenges from fierce competition in traditional industry and increasing concern on environment protection, hotels in China are seeking practice of green supply chain (GSC), which helps in both raising operation efficiency and minimising environmental impacts. Rooting from a case study in China's hotel industry, this study intends to firstly build a new conceptual model of hotel GSC by integrating the concept of front-back stage decoupling. Then a mathematical model based on the concept of ant colony labour division is constructed to explain and verify the mechanism of the new GSC model. Moreover simulation is conducted for model testing and further discussion, which finally leads to the conclusions and future research suggestion.