An optimization-based cooperative game approach for systematic allocation of costs and benefits in interplant process integration

The use of process integration (PI) tools in industrial ecology (IE) applications, particularly industrial symbiosis (IS), can lead to greater sustainability gains than is possible for single plants or companies. Such integration is facilitated by the advent of eco-industrial parks (EIPs) which use geographic clustering to promote sustainable exchange of materials and energy streams among different plants and companies. In particular, PI methods have been developed for total site integration and successfully implemented in documented industrial cases. However, one aspect of interplant integration is not easily done using classical PI methods, since each potential partner company will participate in a symbiosis scheme specifically with the motivation of increasing its own profits. The self-interest of each partner thus results in conflict of interest which, if not resolved, may result in the failure of the initiative. To address this problem, it is necessary to use an approach based on cooperative game theory which involves pooling the benefits, and then subsequently developing a rational and defensible scheme for sharing the incremental profits among the partners. In this work, we propose the application of a linear programming (LP) cooperative game model to allocate benefits that accrue from interplant integration in an EIP. The approach is first demonstrated using a literature case study, and the results are compared with those determined via alternative cooperative game techniques. Two industrial case studies on interplant integration in palm-based biomass processing complex and sago-based biorefinery (SBB) are then solved to further illustrate the applicability of this technique to problems of more realistic scale.