Développement d’une approche multidimensionnelle dédiée à l’évaluation et à la planification des symbioses industrielles par l’intégration de l’analyse des réseaux écologiques

Abstract

Industrial and regional symbioses are biologically inspired strategies that aim at mitigating climate change and resources limitation by creating exchanges networks. These systems are mainly studied with a structural and a functional approach, that are led independently. The first one aims at understanding the conditions of symbiosis development and success while the second one intends to quantify their benefits, mainly environmental. The proposed approach intends to address symbiotic systems complexity and evolution. Thus, the main goal of this research project is to develop a systemic approach to assess the performance and to plan the evolution of symbiotic systems by integrating the ecological network analysis as a method to address the structural dimension. To do so, the project is divided in three parts: the first and second parts develop a multidimensional analysis framework which join the structural and functional approach. Applied to the industrial (part 1) and territorial (part 2) scales, this framework puts the structural aspect of networks in regard of the environmental and territorial dimensions. The ecological network analysis is then mobilized to provide a statistical analysis (part 3) that aims at characterizing networks depending on the flows volume distribution. This characterization allows to define targets for the evolution trajectories that would help systems to evolve while staying in a range of performance close to the natural ecosystems one. Following a scenario approach, the results showed that the network configuration influenced the structural performance more than the functional one. The latter was more related to the networks’ exchanges density. The multidimensional analysis, both at the industrial and regional scale, showed that the structural dimension is complementary to the environmental and regional analysis: it encouraged to consider the systems performances as the combination of non-optimal subsystems that contribute to achieve the global optimum. The evolution trajectories study showed that the volume distribution among the network exchanges can help but is not sufficient to guarantee the system performance. The proposed approach contributed to the systemic analysis of symbiotic systems by considering their complexity while offering directions to guide their evolution to maintain their performance, either structural or functional. The framework is not only applicable on symbioses but on any system and contribute, by the diversity of dimensions examined, to the resilience assessment of anthropic systems. This diversity in the performance assessment could be considered as a first step toward redefining the current frameworks that could go along with the new paradigms that are gaining importance, such as circular economy.

Date	29 Sept 2023
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Mathias Glaus (Supervisor)