Requirements Engineering for an Industrial Symbiosis Tool for Industrial Parks Covering System Analysis, Transformation Simulation and Goal Setting

Abstract

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is a collaborative cross-sectoral approach to connect the resource supply and demand of various industries in order to optimize the resource use through exchange of materials, energy, water and human resources across different companies, while generating ecological, technical, social and economic benefits. One of the main goals of IS is the set-up of advanced circular/cascading systems, in which the energy and material flows are prolonged for multiple utilization within industrial systems in order to increase resource productivity and efficiency, while reducing the environmental load. Many Information Communication Technology (ICT) tools have been developed to facilitate IS, but they predominantly focus on the as-is analysis of the IS system, and do not consider the development of a common desired target vision or corresponding possible future scenarios as well as conceivable transformation paths from the actual to the defined (sustainability) target state. This gap shall be addressed in this paper, presenting the software requirements engineering results for a holistic IT-supported IS tool covering system analysis, transformation simulation and goal-setting. This new approach goes beyond system analysis and includes the use of expert systems, system dynamics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, which turn the IT-supported IS tool to be developed into a comprehensive and holistic instrument with which future scenarios and transformation paths can be simulated.

Recurring Patterns and Blueprints of Industrial Symbioses as Structural Units for an IT Tool

“…This proposed IS tool facilitates the technology-enabling environment for IS initiation, management and continuous improvement as a mean to exhaustively exploit IS potentials for leveraging sustainable industrial development and to provide easy-to-use business support to industrial actors and to increase user friendliness and IS adoption in industrial systems, triggered by inter alia lack of knowledge of IS possibilities and lack of information sharing among companies. This study is embedded in an overarching project, dealing with the development of a holistic IT-supported IS tool covering an information exchange platform among industrial actors, system analysis (identification of IS potentials via quantitative methods such as Material Flow Analysis), transformation simulation (e.g., dynamic supply-demand match makings within an IS system) and sustainability goal-setting [16].…”

“…The existing (scientific) literature and the corresponding knowledge about IS systems already provides a first basis for pooling such information in knowledge bases such as MAESTRI [24], to which IT-supported IS tools should have access in order to facilitate and outline further IS exchanges and connections [16,20,93]. Additionally, once the developed IS resource exchange catalog is linked to an IT-supported IS tool, in which companies can enter their production input-output information, specific recommendations for potential IS partners and respective IS resource exchanges can be suggested by mapping compatible input-output resource flows of the entered data and the underlying IS data base.…”

“…In order to provide better knowledge diffusion and experience transfer, practical cases of IS and detailed physical resource exchanges (including material, water, energy) found in literature was pooled in an IS dataset (which can be the content basis for a relational database), creating a catalogue of IS resource exchanges and activities which can serve as elementary blueprint pieces. This systematized approach opens up the access from technology-enabling environments (e.g., IT-supported IS tools) to pool and (semi-)automatically process information/data in order to facilitate the identification of potential IS cooperation partners and further IS activities [16]. This recommendation can initialize further action of the business user to initiate business negotiations for possible IS connections among suitable cooperation partners.…”

“…All the mentioned observations have driven the current work, which aims to facilitate the technology-enabling environment for IS initiation, management and continuous improvement as a mean to exhaustively exploit IS potentials for leveraging sustainable industrial development and to provide easy-to-use business support to industrial actors and to increase user friendliness and IS adoption in industrial systems, because the barriers of inter alia lack of knowledge of IS possibilities, a lack of information sharing among companies are significantly lowered. This study is embedded in an overarching project, addressing the development of a holistic Information Technology (IT)-supported IS tool covering an information exchange platform among industrial actors, system analysis (identification of IS potentials via quantitative methods such as Material Flow Analysis), transformation simulation (e.g., dynamic supply-demand match makings within an IS system) and sustainability goal-setting [16]. As inter-company information exchange is crucial to identify and implement IS opportunities [9,10,[17][18][19], the proposed IT-supported IS tool shall provide companies with easy-to-understand, structured and specific information as well as specific recommendations for actions regarding potential IS activities to business users.…”

“…As inter-company information exchange is crucial to identify and implement IS opportunities [9,10,[17][18][19], the proposed IT-supported IS tool shall provide companies with easy-to-understand, structured and specific information as well as specific recommendations for actions regarding potential IS activities to business users. Within this project an IS expert system, which is to be integrated into the IT-supported IS tool [16] and a hybrid-approach of agent-based modelling (ABM) and Reinforcement learning (Machine Learning technique) for simulating the dynamics of IS systems [20] are being developed. An expert system is a computer program that derives recommendations for action from a knowledge/data base like a human expert [21].…”