(21a) Application of Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) of An Integrated System Modeling Framework for Designing a Sustainable Industrial Park

Attaining industrial sustainability at the local/regional level requires collaborative efforts from participating agents toward common goals including resource conservation, low carbon emission, production efficiency, economic viability, and corporate social responsibility. Our existing socio-technical systems should transition or evolve towards achieving system’s sustainability. This study aims to operationalize the idea of system’s sustainability by developing an Agent-based model framework for designing an industrial ecology-modeled forest biorefinery. Novel system-based integrative modeling tools with consideration of triple pillars of sustainability and stakeholders’ interests should be developed.

Forest and forest product plays an important role in addressing climate change; Indeed, trees have a unique ability to sequester and store carbon and therefore serve as a tool for carbon sequestration. From an industrial perspective, this industry plays a major role in sustainable development because of its chief raw material—wood fiber—is renewable (Douglas et Al, 1998). Industrial production in the forestry sector, including biomass, represents about 2 percent of world economic activity - annually more than US$400 billion - and 3 percent of world trade in merchandise; with paper and board alone accounting for almost half of these totals (Wergens, 1995).

Forest-based product industry has been undergoing regulatory reform worldwide for more than a decade, aiming to reduce carbon emissions, fossil fuel use and economic efficiency.  Market performance depends largely on how each market actor responds to market design, including land exploitation rules, market observations, and information access. It is often the case that big pulpwood mills have gained more from these structured markets than retailers or local communities, partly because they have increasingly more opportunities to adapt their behavior to changing market conditions in profit maximizing ways. Unfortunately, some of this profit-driven behavior exacerbates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. At the same time, interest has increased in use of market-based policy instruments for environmental purposes, for example, to introduce climate change into the energy sector and reduce GHG emissions.

These challenges are just one aspect of the problem. A need to mitigate ecological impacts, especially greenhouse gas emissions, and energy use have highlighted the need to develop methods capable of addressing economic and ecological uncertainties consistently within an integrated framework. Forest product industry and its network are an evolving system of complex interactions between nature, physical structure, market rules, and participants. Participants face risk and volatility as they pursue their goals and make decisions based on limited information and their mental model of how they believe the system operates.

The industrial eco-system approach will provide comparative information in terms of industrial system response (e.g., how small changes in industrial process from one actor, or a specific event can lead to unexpected scenarios?) and develop ways to use comparative data to predict system responses. This approach will define the system characteristics that make a response either site-specific or more general, and will identify which policy solutions are applicable to similar environmental, economic or social problems.

Implementing an ABM tool within an industrial ecosystem will require a shift in the current culture of researchers working at distributed sites with individual outcomes to a culture that includes the pooling of capabilities, sharing of information, materials, technology, and knowledge. This represents a new paradigm for traditional engineering research. Even though the role of specialized researchers will remain important in their respective fields, their findings will increasingly be applied across disciplines, and the relevance of their results will be valued as part of the whole. Moreover, the use of simulation modeling such Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) for this type of project will provide broader insights on the potential of dynamic simulation modeling for large scale projects on complex system that would otherwise require infrastructure use to test the feasibility of the model.

Agent-based models, allow bottom-up simulations of organizations constituted by a large number of interacting parts. Thus, industrial ecosystems constitute an obvious field of application. This contribution explains what agent-based models are, reviews applications in the field of industrial ecosystems and focuses on a simulator of infra- and inter-firm communications.

From an industrial network perspective, ABM seems to be useful to model large scale system, by feeding the system with rules corresponding to the assumptions of what is most relevant regarding the situation within the industrial eco-park and then watch the emerging behavior from the agents' interactions.

The focus of this study is on showing how this concept of sustainable assessment can be achieved on a practical realization. The project will initially focus on pulp and paper industry in the state of Maine. The system boundary (industrial eco-park) sets the background for a promising application of regional sustainable evaluation. In the next chapter we will show how the forest-based product industry can be seen as a dynamic system, how an industrial eco-park can be built around this regional industry.

For this model the actors (turtles) will be a timber stock, a pulp plant, a stand-alone biomass facility a cement plant, each one of them either produce or consume pulp and lignin.

The goal is to see how they can work in symbiosis (see previous paragraph). What are the conditions for them to allow transfer of flow of material between their plants. The main forces will their sensitivity to regulation of Co2 emissions, and subsidies incentives. Also, there is a wide diversity of agents within the system, agents use different strategies, have different capacities, use different generation technologies, have different motivation, and could be physically located at different locations. In summary, the interactions between the industry partners have the intrinsic features of a complex system: a large number of participating agents, interacting on the basis of limited information and reacting to changes in demand (due to new trend such as newsprint drop and higher level of paper recycling for example). Key questions then arise: What kinds of new material/energy synergies scenarios can emerge? At what conditions? And for how long these new scenarios can be sustained?

The purpose of simulation modeling such as Agent-based modeling is to generate and explore alternative futures that may develop under different conditions. These simulators can explore various “what if” scenarios under different economic, social goals. They can show the possible evolutionary trajectories of given scenarios under different conditions and geographical context. An industrial eco-park organized around the forest-based product industry is a relevant area of application. Indeed, the industry due to its current economic challenges and inherent structure offer a variety of opportunities for synergies. Simulation modeling can be highly useful, especially in terms of policy making.

The ABM modeling approaches provide a coherent and robust approach in dealing with the complexity of industrial eco-systems, including the ability to address their inherent uncertainty. The combined modeling approach allows the analysis of policy-making tools and their ability to cooperate industrial ecosystem management, therefore providing solutions and clues to those organizations that have an interest in designing or promoting eco-industrial networks.