Toward a network perspective for understanding resilience and sustainability in industrial symbiotic networks

Industrial symbiotic (IS) networks attempt to mimic ecological systems in order to develop synergistic networks where waste equals food. Overall, such complex systems are observed to have high efficiency, performance, and robustness but are often fragile and vulnerable to unanticipated perturbations. As most IS networks are based on ad-hoc opportunities rather than strategic planning, gaining insight into disruptive scenarios and their impact is pivotal for understanding the balance between resilience and sustainability, and designing efficient and robust networks. Much of the existing work on network analysis of IS complexes has focused on studying the resource flows with little to no emphasis on understanding tradeoffs between resilience and sustainability. The present work focuses on employing network analysis to fill this void. Considering the industries as nodes and flows of water and steam as edges, we construct a network of the IS complex in Kalundborg, Denmark. From our analysis of the Kalundborg Industrial Symbiosis, it is evident that the power plant is the most vulnerable industry and a single point of failure in the network. Increasing the flexibility of the interactions between the industries can increase the resilience of the network.