Soft Infrastructure Enhancing Resilience in Industrial Symbiosis

Network analysis has provided an approach to identify vulnerabilities in industrial symbiotic networks (ISN). While its implication for resilience is limited to the physical domain, the latest resilience paradigm points to soft infrastructure such as information technology and cognitive systems domains relevant to abilities of anticipation, decision making, and fast response pre- and post-event. Such abilities are suggested in literature to achieve harmony between resilience and sustainable development in the fast-changing economy. To understand the role of soft infrastructure in the resilience of ISN, we take a case study from Kalundborg, Denmark, and explore how the proposed soft infrastructure can facilitate the resilience of the Kalundborg Industrial Symbiosis (KIS) network. The KIS has established an exchange network of waste material, water, and energy among companies with efficient synergies and has kept evolving over the years. While the closed-loop system mitigates the external impact, failures within the systems are concerning due to the high interdependence among companies. Previous studies on KIS reported that certain nodes in the network are critical to fail and cause cascading impacts. However, replacing the nodes or a topological change are usually long-term actions and difficult to be responsive during a shock. To address the problem, soft infrastructure accelerates the decision-making and action process through, for example, a transparent, efficient, and timely information exchange. Also, it provides the capability of anticipation pre-event and early warning of possible cascading impacts across the network. To analyze the potential benefit or detriment of the soft infrastructure introduced to an ISN, we develop a hybrid network model for the KIS example, integrating the input-output model and diffusion model. A benchmark is proposed for the KIS without soft infrastructure through network-based resilience assessment, which includes preparedness, robustness, and recovery stages as a resilience cycle with disruption simulations. In the comparative scenario, soft infrastructure is introduced based on assumptions to alter the behavior of companies during disruption simulations, and a blockchain-empowered data-sharing platform is selected for the demonstration. In the new scenario, the KIS with soft infrastructure displays a changed distribution of sources of vulnerability in the network and different network dynamics in the simulated disruptions. Moreover, it takes reduced steps to respond to shocks and mitigates the failure propagation through the loop by the relocation of the resource among companies. This work provides new implications for the resilience of ISN beyond the physical infrastructure. Soft infrastructure enhances the flexibility and plasticity of ISN systems as well as the accessibility to external intervention and support, ensuring their adaptability in the face of internal failures.