A methodological framework for Eco-Industrial Park design and optimization

An Eco-Industrial Park (EIP) is composed of a number of Industrial Symbiosis (IS) instances, which allow energy/material exchanges among the different industrial enterprises (Individual Actors, IA) therein. By so doing, IA's economic and environmental performances can be improved. Despite recent methodological advancements, the existing approaches to EIP design optimization are still suffering from several major problems: (i) dominance of the global EIP optimum over the local IA optimum, (ii) limited number of optimization objectives falling into the categories of economic and environmental objectives and (iii) EIP optimization performed without considering possible operational uncertainties. In addition, the adoption of the bio-inspired concept of IS makes EIP evolve from classical engineered systems towards complex engineered systems, with associated static and dynamic complexity characteristics.