Industrial Cluster Symbiosis Optimisation Based on Linear Programming

Industrial Symbiosis is a symbiotic relationship between dissimilar industries that is achieved by the flow of waste and byproducts as an output from one production unit to another as a resource to be used for production. The described symbiosis has many environmental and economical benefits generated from reducing the cost of resources used in the production process. The main concern with implementing such a system is the guarantee for an even distribution among the participating production units of the extra profit generated through the trading process. Otherwise, it would be intuitively difficult to convince the participants to implement the system we suggest. In this work, we model the problem through mathematical programming and we propose a solution based on a series of linear programmes that maximises and balances the profit between the production units. A first model focuses on pure byproducts trading, and a more advanced model that considers the trading process within a dynamic electricity market where electricity costs vary over time. Computational experiments to validate the proposed approach are finally presented and discussed.