Industrial Symbiosis Recommender Systems

For a long time, humanity has lived upon the paradigm that the amounts of natural resources are unlimited and that the environment has ample regenerative capacity. However, the notion to shift towards sustainability has resulted in a worldwide adoption of policies addressing resource efficiency and preservation of natural resources.One of the key environmental and economic sustainable operations that is currently promoted and enacted in the European Union policy is Industrial Symbiosis. In industrial symbiosis, firms aim to reduce the total material and energy footprint by circulating traditional secondary production process outputs of firms to become part of an input for the production process of other firms.This thesis directs attention to the design considerations for recommender systems in the highly dynamic domain of industrial symbiosis. Recommender systems are a promising technology that may facilitate in multiple facets of the industrial symbiosis creation as they reduce the complexity of decision making. This typical strength of recommender systems has been responsible for improved sales and a higher return of investments. That provides the prospect for industrial symbiosis recommenders to increase the number of synergistic transactions that reduce the total environmental impact of the process industry in particular

Resource inventory for fostering industrial symbiosis practices

In this paper, we investigate the potential environmental benefits obtainable in Industrial Symbiotic Networks (ISNs) in case firms stock wastes when the demand is lower than supply. We design multiagent-based simulations to model the spontaneous emergence and operations of ISNs over time where firms are involved in substitution-based symbiotic relationships. In each simulation, we compute: 1) the amount of resources saved with respect to the amount of produced wastes; and 2) the amount of resources not saved because of the lack of inventory compared to the produced amounts. Results show that waste stocking could be a useful strategy to reduce the negative effects of the waste market dynamicity on the match between demand and suppl

The Footprint of Things: A hybrid approach towards the collection, storage and distribution of life cycle inventory data

Life cycle assessment is a well-established methodology for assessing the environmental impacts of products and services. Unfortunately, an essential part of this life cycle assessment method, collecting inventory data, is extremely time consuming. The quality of manually conducted LCA studies is often limited by uncertainty in the inventory data or narrow scope. Past attempts to overcome these challenges through automation of data collection utilizing the Internet of Things have relied on fully centralized architectures. The drawback of a central repository is the complex coordination between all involved actors in supply chains of products and services. This paper proposes an alternative hybrid approach combining a primary distributed system supplemented with a central repository reducing the need for coordination. This hybrid approach is named "the Footprint of Things". We present a system design that embeds the automatic reporting of life cycle inventory data, such as energy and material flows, into all product components involved in a service delivery. The major strength of our novel system design, among others, is its capacity for real-time and more precise impact calculation of ICT services

Zijm Consortium: Engineering a Sustainable Supply Chain System

In this paper we address one of the current major research areas of the Zijm consortium; engineering sustainable supply chain systems by transforming traditionally linear practices to circular systems. We illustrate this field of research with a case consisting of a network of three firms Willem (W), Hendrik (H), and Maria (M)} and show how the practice of application-oriented state of the art technology transformed their linear relation to the circular Zijm consortium. The work shows that through inspiration and knowledge transfer in the versatile picturesque Twente Region, a group of future generation researchers are shaped

The Footprint of Things: A hybrid approach towards the collection, storage and distribution of life cycle inventory data

Life cycle assessment is a well-established methodology for assessing the environmental impacts of products and services. Unfortunately, an essential part of this life cycle assessment method, col- lecting inventory data, is extremely time consuming. The quality of manually conducted LCA studies is often limited by uncertainty in the inventory data or narrow scope. Past attempts to overcome these challenges through automation of data collection utilizing the Internet of Things have relied on fully centralized architectures. The drawback of a central repository is the complex coordination between all involved actors in supply chains of products and services. This paper proposes an alternative hybrid approach combining a primary distributed system supplemented with a central repository reducing the need for coordination. This hybrid approach is named "the Footprint of Things". We present a system design that embeds the automatic reporting of life cycle inventory data, such as energy and material flows, into all product components involved in a service delivery. The major strength of our novel system design, among others, is its capacity for real-time and more precise impact calculation of ICT services

The development of phishing during the COVID-19 pandemic: An analysis of over 1100 targeted domains

To design preventive policy measures for email phishing, it is helpful to be aware of the phishing schemes and trends that are currently applied. How phishing schemes and patterns emerge and adapt is an ongoing field of study. Existing phishing works already reveal a rich set of phishing schemes, patterns, and trends that provide insight into the mechanisms used. However, there seems to be limited knowledge about how email phishing is affected in periods of social disturbance, such as COVID-19 in which phishing numbers have quadrupled. Therefore, we investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic influences the phishing emails sent during the first year of the pandemic. The email content (header data and html body, excl. attachments) is evaluated to assess how the pandemic influences the topics of phishing emails over time (peaks and trends), whether email campaigns correlate with momentous events and trends of the COVID-19 pandemic, and what hidden content revealed. This is studied through an in-depth analysis of the body of 500.000 phishing emails addressed to Dutch registered top-level domains collected during the start of the pandemic. The study reveals that most COVID-19 related phishing emails follow known patterns indicating that perpetrators are more likely to adapt than to reinvent their schemes

The influence of knowledge in the design of a recommender system to facilitate industrial symbiosis markets

Industrial symbiosis aims to stimulate or enhance cooperation between industrial firms to utilize industrial waste streams from other industries and to share related knowledge, in order to achieve sustainable production. Recommenders can support industries through the identification of item opportunities in waste marketplaces, enhancing activities that may lead to the development of an active waste exchange network. To build effective recommendation, we study the role of knowledge in the design of a recommender that suggests waste materials to be used in process industries. This paper compares the performance of a knowledge based input-output recommender with a recommender based on association rules. The two recommenders are evaluated with real-world data collected through deploying surveys in a workshop setting. Our research shows that many data challenges arise when creating recommendations from explicit knowledge and suggests that techniques based on the concept of implicit knowledge may be preferable in the design of an industrial symbiosis recommender