The resilience of interdependent industrial symbiosis networks
— A case of Yixing Economic and Technological Development Zone
document
Summary
- An industrial symbiosis (IS) network (ISN) 工业共生网络
- investigated the relationship between resilience and interdependency within and between various IS systems.
- An interdependent networkmodel was proposed based on complex network theory, which preserved the heterogeneity of exchange content and the diversity of symbiosis relationships
- increased interdependency contributed to the vulnerability of the system, but it did not necessarily contribute to its resilience
- identified the significant companies, materials, and infrastructure pipes
- the consequence of cascading failures in a single network and distinguished the most vulnerable companies exposed to failures by simulations.
Introduction
- physical exchange of knowledge, human or technical resources, concurrently providing environmental and competitive benefits
- aim of article: advance the understanding of relationships between interdependency and resilience of ISNs
- we employed an interdependent network model that preserves both the heterogeneity of exchange contents and the diversity of IS relationships and
developed a set of rules to assess the resilience of ISNs under certain changes. Yixing Economic and Technological Development Zone (YETDZ)
- the significance of components in ISNs is not uniform, and more-centralized components have more impact on resilience.
- the cascading effect enlarges initial failure and causes the breakdown of systems
- interdependency between IS systems may cause unforeseen disasters in the system
Understanding and controlling of interdependency should be an indispensable part of ISN research and planning.
Methodology
Network modeling of industrial symbiosis networks
A network is a structure composed of a set
V
of nodes and a set
Two kinds of networks can be generated, two types of IS:
- material exchange
should preserve the heterogeneity of exchange materials and the input-output (I-O) directions, a directed bipartite network model is recommended.
two kinds of entities (companies and materials) into two sets of nodes V1 and V2 , depicted I−O relationships as directed edges between V1 and V2
- inftrastructure sharing
undirected graphs, edges represent infrastructure piptes and nodes representing companies in infrastructure-sharing networks, an interconnected network model can be created as a synthetic representation.
Assessing the resilience of industrial symbiosis networks
Definition: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks
Disruption can be categorized as:
- random changes: equipment faults/ seasonal variations/ operation errors
- deliberate changes: process upgrading/ shutting down of high-polluting companies.
The consequence of node/edge removal was determined by the following assumptions.
- how to determine whether an element is still functioning in the network. Lost incoming edge or lost all its sources, the company or material node lost all its sources, marked as failure
- cascade effect of failure: failure of one company node would eliminate all its outgoing edges, which might cause the failure of other elements in the network when the first assumption is met.
we use response curve and the area under the curve (AUC) score to measure the resilience of a system in a specified scenario of disruptions. The scenario clarifies the strategy of node/ edge removal in the simulation: should the node/edge be randomly or deleberately removed?…
By placing the proportion of removed elements on the horizontal axis, and the proportion of elements remain functioning on the vertical axis, we can draw the “response curve” that depicts system response to the disruptions.
A small AUC value indicates that the system is more vulnerable/less resilient to the disruptions in the scenario.
The case of Yixing Economic and technological development zone
* Overview *
This industrial park consists of over 1,200 companies from both traditional industries (textile/mechanical/chemical industry) and emerging ones (new energy/new material industry).
Data Acquisition and network construction
A synthetic (人造,合成) data acquisition method
First. scope of research was confined to 86 enterprises that had an annual income above 20 million RMB and detailed government statistics.
Second. Different data sources were combined to build two databases: one for material exchanges and the other for infrastructure sharing.
material exchanges: official data, including environmental impact assessment reports, cleaner production reports and a pollutant discharge registration database.
surveys and interview results during 2009-2012, for correcting and renewing the data
the ecoinvent life cycle database and advice from professionals.
Third. Four networks were created from the databases and formed an interdependent network model.
1) whether it is an essential supply to the receiver
2) whether it is involved in the exchange of by-product/waste.
Three infrastructure-sharing networks (water/stream/NG network) were undirected networks.
Results
General Network Analysis
Consider the direct effect of changing an element in the network.
In a static manner, by calculating the centrality score of corresponding elements.
Degree
- Cumulative Degree Distribution for companies or materials
- kernel density plot of rescaled edge betweenness in infrastructure-sharing networks
The edge betweenness metric, the number of shortest paths between pairs of vertices that run along an edge, was then used for these networks and the distribution for edge betweenness of each edge…
Resilience of a single industrial symbiosis network
- Material exchange network
examine the resilience of network under different levels of random and deliberate changes.
In each simulation step, the chosen companies would lost all their outgoing edges and be marked as failure and propagate this failure to its downstream companies.
To measure the resilience in a certain scenario, we use the AUC score of the response curve as the indicator.
Resilience of the interdependent industrial symbiosis networks
Discussion
ISNs may be highly vulnerable when disruption happens, especially when three key factors are met:
- disruptions on structurally significant components
- the existence of cascading effects
interdependency between different IS systems
- First, structurally significant components do exist in various ISNs.
- Second, the cascading effect enlarges initially small, controllable failures and may eventually lead to a disastrous system-level disruption.
- Last, the increased interdependency within and between IS systems should be noticed and managed in case of severe damage.