An Extended KTH-Best Apprach for Referential-Uncooperative Bilevel Multi-Follower Decision Making

Bilevel decision techniques have been mainly developed for solving decentralized management problems with decision makers in a hierarchical organization. When multiple followers are involved in a bilevel decision problem, called a bilevel multi-follower (BLMF) decision problem, the leader’s decision will be affected, not only by the reactions of these followers, but also by the relationships among these followers. The referential-uncooperative situation is one of the popular cases of BLMF decision problems where these multiple followers don’t share decision variables with each other but may take others’ decisions as references to their decisions. This paper presents a model for the referential-uncooperative BLMF decision problem. As the kth-best approach is one of the most successful approaches in dealing with normal bilevel decision problems, this paper then proposes an extended kth-best approach to solve the referential-uncooperative BLMF problem. Finally an example of logistics planning illustrates the application of the proposed extended kth-best approach.