Capturing the Complexity of Industrial Symbiosis

The quest for sustainability in industry leads to interdisciplinary concepts such as industrial symbiosis, which refers to the exchange of resources between industrial plants to turn the waste of one plant into the input of the other. Identifying, evaluating and comparing potential exchanges requires the collection of large amounts of heterogenous data from different data sources, a shared understanding of the system and a common terminology between the different sciences. However, research is still faced with the challenge of establishing a uniform terminology and understanding of concepts in the domain. The lack of common understanding and data and the complexity of industrial symbiosis leads to poor communication and limited understanding. In the area of IT, it leads to insufficient interoperability, reusability and integration of IT artifacts. To address these problems, we aim to provide a domain-specific terminology capable to represent the domain’s structure and to create a common understanding of industrial symbiosis. Our approach is an ontology, which uses a consolidated terminology. The analysis of existing ontologies shows that they present different concepts, use different terminology and cover different parts of the domain. Therefore, we synthesize these ontologies and the literature to obtain a more comprehensive representation. Furthermore, we incorporate external elements of the system and introduce a differentiated view of the technological level and the logistic infrastructure. Our ontology serves as terminological base for the community and structures industrial symbiosis systems. In a further step, it has to be formalized to transform it into the means of information technology.