Optimization methods applied to the design of eco-industrial parks: a literature review

With the growing environmental concern, there is evidence that increasing symbiotic relationship between plants in the same industrial area, highly contributes to a more sustainable development of industrial activities. The concept of industrial ecology extended to the terms of eco-industrial park (or ecopark) or industrial symbioses is the topic of extensive research since the five last years. More particularly, even if a lot of ecopark examples and realizations already exist throughout the world, a lot of ecopark proposals are in progress but not achieved. Recently, this vision leads the research community to focus on works proposing methods to optimize the exchanges of an ecopark prior to its design and construction. We find it especially interesting for the scientific community to propose a detailed paper review focused on optimization works devoted to the design of eco industrial parks. This paper is based on a comprehensive literature search in Web of Science database for publications that listed 'industrial symbiosis' (or 'eco industrial park', or 'inter plant integration') and 'optimization'. This study is segmented into different sections with first, a description of the different concepts evoked in the literature. Then, the several types of networking in an eco-industrial park are detailed in association with the optimization methods employed to solve each problem. The following sections reviews the different objective functions that are formulated to optimally design an eco-industrial park. The last part of the paper is devoted to a critical analysis of the state of the art by proposing several routes to improve the methodologies found in the literature. Another aim of this paper review consists in finding the gaps existing in previous studies. These major gaps are found to be: the lack of multiobjective optimization studies, the absence of social/societal objectives formulation also needs to be addressed and the lack of works taking into account flexibility of ecoparks in an operational point of view. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.