(714c) Integrated Exergy and Material Based System Analysis for Sustainability Enhancement Under Uncertainties

Industrial sustainability is pursued by people to achieve the long-term sustainable development of a given industrial zone. In this endeavor, an industry system must be analyzed, and further improved to ensure its economic prosperity, environmental cleanness, and social responsibility. In general, material and energy are the two most fundamental aspects of an industrial system. Thus, a comprehensive and convictive study on an industrial system must be implemented systematically and coordinately. Another key issue in industrial sustainability study is the inherent uncertainties that are associated with data, information, and knowledge, which must be dealt with properly in the analysis and improvement for long-term resource and energy sustainability.

In this paper, an integrated exergy and material based system analysis (IEMA) approach is introduced for comprehensive assessment and enhancement of the sustainability of industrial systems under uncertainties. The introduced methodology contains four methods for (i) exergy analysis under uncertainty, (ii) material flow analysis under uncertainty, (iii) fuzzy logic based exergy-material combined sustainability assessment, and (iv) sustainability enhancement. For a given system problem, the exergy and material input, output and loss of all the entities in it are quantified respectively with the system configuration, for which the known data and information could be imprecise and incomplete. Then, a systematic fuzzy assessment procedure is applied to quantify the system's degree of sustainability. The assessment is conducted using fuzzy knowledge base. The lower layer of the knowledge base contains rules for assessing specific types of exergy-material combined sustainability, while the upper layer has a number of rules designed for evaluating the overall industrial sustainability based on the triple-bottom-line information obtained from the lower layer. After that, feasible system modification strategies will be derived by a fuzzy optimization technique. The main advantage of the introduced approach is its capability of analyzing and improving sustainability of industrial systems by systematically integrating both the energy and material based analysis under uncertainties. The efficacy of the approach will be illustrated through analyzing the sustainability issues and developing strategies for enhancing the sustainability of an automotive manufacturing centered industrial zone.