(209b) Evaluating Dynamic Resilience of Intermittent and Uncontrollable Techno-Ecological Systems

Engineering sciences have made a constant effort towards the goal of sustainable development. In particular, chemical engineering has developed multiple techniques like heat and mass integration, waste reduction and eco-industrial parks aimed at reducing the ecological impact. Using the framework of Techno-Ecological Synergy (TES), Bakshi and co-workers [1, 2, 3] have incorporated ecological systems in process and supply chain design space to obtain novel ecologically and economically win-win solution. These novel systems aim to improve sustainability by matching the ecological goods or service utilization rate with its regeneration rate.

Unlike technological systems, the dynamics of ecosystems are not "controllable". In order to ensure sustainability of TES system, the design and operation should be "viable" over long periods of time i.e. the design should be resilient. The term "resilience" has been defined across multiple disciplines with varying definition. Resilience can be used to describe a system’s resistance capacity, coping capacity, adaptive preference or its transformative capacity to avoid irreversible changes while sustaining large shocks [4].

In this work, we employ the mathematical framework of viability theory [5] to analyze the viable operational domain of TES systems. We employ various dynamic resilience metrics to analyze and design control strategy for ensuring a sustainable operation of the novel TES systems. We compare the resilience of TES systems with that of conventional technocentric systems. This study helps us integrate the intermittent and uncontrollable dynamics of ecosystem with the control of technological system’s paradigm and design "resilient" sustainable systems.

References

[1] Bhavik R. Bakshi. Toward Sustainable Chemical Engineering: The Role of Process Systems Engineering. Annual Reviews in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Accepted, 2019.

[2] Utkarsh Shah and Bhavik R. Bakshi. Accounting for nature’s intermittency and growth while mitigating no 2 emissions by technoecological synergistic design-application to a chloralkali process. Journal of Advanced Manufacturing and Processing, 0(0):e10013, Mar 28, 2019.

[3] Tapajyoti Ghosh, Xinyu Liu, and Bhavik R Bakshi. Including ecosystem services in sustainable process design across multiple spatial scales. In Computer Aided Chemical Engineering, volume 44, pages 1837–1842. Elsevier, 2018.

[4] Christophe Béné and Luc Doyen. From resistance to transformation: a generic metric of resilience through viability. Earth’s Future, 6(7):979–996, 2018.

[5] Jean-Pierre Aubin. Viability theory. Springer Science & Business Media, 2009.