Resilience study applied in eco-industrial Parks

Abstract

An Eco-Industrial Park (EIP) is a community of businesses that seeks to reduce the global impact through material sharing. Even though an EIP presents an environmental improvement when compared with a set of stand-alone industrial plants, the established connections among the industrial participants can propagate failures, and become in a source of risk. For this reason, this work proposes an indicator to follow the resilience of EIPs, which is constructed to be applied on the design phase of eco-industrial parks, by means of an optimization problem. This indicator is based on two aspects of an industrial network: its topology and its operative flexibility. These aspects are measured by two respective sub-indicators, Network Connectivity Index (NCI) and Flow adaptability index (ϕ). Both sub-indicators are integrated to compose a global resilience indicator. Finally, we apply the resilience indicator over five illustrative cases in order to analyze its applicability, obtaining consistent results.