Study on the construction and optimization of a resource-based industrial ecosystem

In China, developing industries based on the regional resource endowment is an important approach to increase GDP in many regions in the past few decades. However, the extensive development pattern results in excessive consumption of natural resources and severe environmental pollution. Therefore, the concept of eco-industry and the theory of system engineering are combined and applied in this study. A new interactive inference method to construct industrial ecosystems is proposed. Firstly, a node information database is set up, and a.material group is established according to the resource endowments in the selected region, and the construction rules are defined, such as the termination conditions. Then the structure of the ecosystem is obtained by an interactive inference process between the node information database and all possible combinations in the material group. After the supplement and elimination of nodes, an industrial ecosystem containing 34 nodes is obtained in a certain western region in China. After the industrial ecosystem constructed, a mathematical model is established to optimize the industrial ecosystem, and four aspects of objective functions, including resource efficiency, economic profit, environmental effect and comprehensive benefit, are optimized. After that, four scenarios are analyzed, and the indexes in each scenario are analyzed comparatively. Policy implications for China are proposed. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.