SPARK!

Lecture with platform Industrial Symbiosis

Challenge by Dr. Gijsbert Korevaar (Delft University of Technology)

Problem Industrial Symbiosis is one of the key elements in reaching climate impact reduction in industrial clusters. It enables the users to reach resource efficiency, because of a smarter use of substances, it enables energy efficiency because of more optimized energy patterns. It also allows for a better governance of integrated industrial complexes, because of better insight into value chains and legislative frameworks. In all of those various applications, clearly a reduction of climate impact can be realised. Crucial in finding possible synergies within industrial clusters is to know the location, magnitude, and specifications of material flows, available energy, existing permits, economics of supply chains etc. All those data have to be brought together in an useful way.

Background Many initiatives exist in the Industrial Symbiosis field in which a practitioner collect this information by a direct inventory to all the stakeholders in the cluster. However, a lot of data is already available in datasets on an European level and in that way linked to national bureaus of statistics, governmental agencies, branche organisations, etc. Much of this data is just available via open data sets on websites, in accessible documents, or databases. This presentation and its challenge looks to structure such open source data relevant to industrial symbiosis into an internet-based tool or web-platform. This will be done by the use of semantic wikibased tools, that enables the researcher to search for information in a semiautomatic way. The background of the use and development of those open source data management tools have been described in detail in the PhD thesis of Chris Davis: Making sense of open data (Davis 2012), within our department Energy and Industry at the faculty of Technology, Policy, and Management at TU Delft. In this thesis the application is mainly on energy networks (see also: http://enipedia.tudelft.nl/wiki/Main_Page). For Industrial Symbiosis, a challenging task is now to turn this existing knowledge in an application to industrial clusters that also will require adaptation and further development of the already existing tools. We are really at the beginning of our research in this area, although we already have a good idea about the ontology and structure of such a system, see the scheme below.

Challenge A core question in this entire data project is how to visualise the output? What type of visualisation is most appropriate to help the decision-maker to find the relevant information in a fast and understanding way? So assume that you would have endless amounts of precise and dedicated data: what information would you then present to enable the industrial symbiosis development? What information is crucial for symbiotic synergies? Output We expect a creative and illustrative representation of your solution to the above-mentioned challenge. You could think of: 1) A sketch of a map that contains the relevant information in a certain region 2) A sketch of how the screen(s) of such a webplatform could look like 3) Various types of infographics/graphs/tables that can support the policy-maker or business manager in decisions towards industrial synergies

Future collaboration In our group, we have always many projects available on a master or PhD student level. So if you are interested in questions around infrastructure system design, agent based modelling, supply chain management, industrial ecology, or sustainable chemical engineering, feel free to contact us.

Contact: Dr. Gijsbert Korevaar, G.Korevaar@tudelft.nl