Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is an emerging business tool that is used by practitioners to engage cooperation among industries to reuse waste streams. The key to reveal IS opportunities for organizations is both connecting the supply and demand of various industries and providing technical knowledge on the IS implementation. This process is increasingly supported by information systems which act as a facilitator of communication and distributor of knowledge. However, we lack understanding of a describing role of each type of information system within the process of IS identification. IS literature could benefit from a clear overview of (i) the characteristics of these different information systems, (ii) the role of support these systems provide, and (iii) the technologies used to enable such identification. This paper analyzes the current state of literature that addresses information systems that facilitate IS identification and studies these systems using these three pillars. Our study contributes by providing a classification framework of information systems that facilitate industrial symbiosis identification and reveals three research directions to progress IS identification tools, namely (i) software product and service development (ii) data integration, and (iii) adoption of intelligent learning.
One of the concrete examples of industrial symbiosis development is eco-industrial parks, which improves resource efficiency and minimizes environmental impacts by adopting models for waste exchanges between industries. Despite past efforts, many industrial zones around the world are not yet considered as eco-industrial parks because of the low number (or total lack) of symbiotic relationships among industries. A promising strategy is to develop those existing industrial zones into eco-industrial parks. However, there is a lack of studies addressing how to assess the environmental improvement in relation to network sustainability. This study demonstrates such an assessment approach using an integration of food web analysis and social network analysis. These two methods can assist in assessing differences in network configurations with respect to potential implementations of industrial symbiosis, and in analysing the resilience, redundancy, connectance, and cyclicity of eco-parks. The use of the methods is illustrated in a case study of an industrial zone in Turkey. Four potential future scenarios are proposed including potential future co-location of companies in the industrial zone in order to foster industrial symbiotic network formation. These scenarios are compared with the current configuration. The results indicate the method's ability to assess the resilience of an industrial network. Moreover, the case shows an improvement of network sustainability and follows some sustainable properties of natural ecosystems as a result of implementing the industrial symbiosis.
Nowadays, industrial symbiosis (IS) is recognized as a key strategy to support the transition toward the circular economy. IS deals with the (re)use of wastes produced by a production process as a substitute for traditional production inputs of other traditionally disengaged processes. In this context, this paper provides a systematic literature review on the energy-based IS approach, i.e., IS synergies aimed at reducing the amount of energy requirement from outside industrial systems or the amount of traditional fuels used in energy production. This approach is claimed as effective aimed at reducing the use of traditional fuels in energy production, thus promoting a circular energy transition. 682 papers published between 1997 and 2018 have been collected, and energy-based IS cases have been identified among 96 of these. As a result of the literature review, three categories of symbiotic synergies have been identified: (1) energy cascade; (2) fuel replacement; and (3) bioenergy production. Through the review, different strategies to implement energybased IS synergies are highlighted and discussed for each of the above-mentioned categories. Furthermore, drivers, barriers, and enablers of business development in energy-based IS are discussed from the technical, economic, regulatory, and institutional perspective. Accordingly, future research directions are recommended.
The task of designing a recommender system is a complex process. Because of the many technological advancements that may be included in a recommender system, engineers are faced with a fast growing number of design related decisions to be taken. Unfortunately, there is no general approach yet for decision makers that can act as a framework guiding the design of a recommender system. The rich collection of literature on recommender systems, though, offers a great source to identify the key areas where these decisions need to be taken. In this paper, we survey existing literature with the aim of building a recommender system model inspired by Osterwalder's canvas theory. The result of our semi-structured synthesis is a novel design approach in the form of a canvas for designing recommender systems. This work provides a better understanding and can serve as a guide for decision making in recommender system design.
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