The Role of Large Marketing Companies in the LPG Industry: An Analysis of the Problematic Internetuse with a View from Complex Systems

Abstract

This research addressed the Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) industry in the Colombian context, one of the oldest industries [1], which presents a series of technical, operational, economic, legal and cultural limitations, compared to other fossil and alternative fuels [2]. Currently this industry has been intervened from the application of traditional models, i.e., making a separate analysis of each of the links in the supply chain, moreover, the intervention has focused mainly on price regulation and the granting of subsidies among others, which leaves aside other variables that affect the participation of this industry in the national energy basket, which significantly affects the demand for it, without managing to analyze other links in the supply chain. In fact, the LPG industry in Colombia, as an organizational system, is located within an environment that completely surrounds it, making it necessary to discriminate and separate it into near and far [3], realizing that the system can influence and be influenced by the near environment, which is the one it can access, however, the system cannot influence the remote environment, by which it is influenced [4]. For the specific case of the LPG industry in Colombia, this is not differentiated, it is necessary to identify, define and establish whether it is a complex system in the problematic Internet situations open to the exchange of information with the external environment, and whether it presents a spatial-temporal identity and whether it is characterized by non-linearity [5]. In effect, the above approaches the LPG industry and supports its study in the dynamics of systems, carrying out an analysis of the large marketers from the dynamics of systems, which facilitates understanding and projecting the behavior of this industry, as well as its subsystems from the spatial-static-structural and the interactions or relationships that are created between them [6].