Quantifying the Sustainability of Integrated Urban Waste and Energy Networks: Seeking an Optimal Balance between Network Efficiency and Resilience

With limited natural resources and infrastructures in urban regions, rapid urbanization is arguably one of the most important challenges to sustainable development. To better tackle these challenges there is an urgent need for the development of new approaches where the integration of different urban infrastructural systems leads to resource savings and synergy. Specifically the development and testing of new modeling techniques emphasizing the network sustainability of integrated urban systems is warranted. Past modeling techniques such as emergy, exergy, and extended exergy analysis highlight the sustainability of the urban ecology from an accounting perspective, however there have been few research inroads in utilizing information indices for urban ecological modeling whereby sustainability from the network perspective is evaluated. This paper proposes a conceptual model for an integrated urban waste and energy network composed of 8 compartment and 28 process flows that may be used in future studies in quantifying the sustainability of the integrated network through an emphases of the network's overall resilience and efficiency. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier B. V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of School of Environment, Beijing Normal University.