Lot-sizing for industrial symbiosis

Waste accumulation in landfills, global warming and the need to preserve finite raw materials push governments and industries to shift towards a circular economy. Industrial symbiosis represents a sustainable way of sharing resources and converting unavoidable production residues into useful and added-value products. In this context, we introduce a new production planning problem arisen between two production units (PU) within an industrial symbiosis. During the production process of a main product, a production residue is generated by the first PU, which is subsequently either used as raw materials by the second PU, or disposed of. The second PU can also purchase raw materials from an external supplier. The resulting combined production planning problem has been formulated as a two-level single-item lot-sizing problem. We prove that this problem is NP-Hard irrespective of the production residue, namely unstorable, or storable with a limited capacity. To efficiently solve this problem, a heuristic based on Lagrangian decomposition is proposed. Extensive numerical experiments highlight the effectiveness of the proposed solution method. The impact of the collaborative framework, in which the production plans of each PU are brought together, has been studied via a comparative analysis of different decentralized and centralized collaboration policies. Valuable insights derived from this analysis are subsequently used to discuss the managerial implications of setting up an industrial symbiosis between a supplier of by-products and its receiver.

Automated summary

This paper introduces a new production planning problem in industrial symbiosis and proposes a heuristic based on Lagrangian decomposition to efficiently solve it. Extensive numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution method, and a comparative analysis of different collaboration policies sheds light on the managerial implications of industrial symbiosis.