For an appropriate sustainable development, several objectives must be accounted for. For instance, attaining sustainability metrics and a fairness environment for stakeholders. In this regard, an important element of sustainable development is the fair allocation of resources, equity in policies, and implementation as well as equality in outcomes [1]. Recently, fairness schemes for the allocation of resources in multi-stakeholder systems have been reported [2]. These schemes have been applied to allocate resources in different sectors including, an agricultural system [3] and an integrated residential complex [4]. These studies have highlighted the importance of comparing different allocation schemes in diverse systems and verified some deficiencies of other approaches that may guide to solutions that are not fair. The desired aim would be to simultaneously foster equity, environmental protection, and economic growth [5]. However, these aspects represent a great challenge. In this regard, an economic approach to involve sustainability in process integration projects has been reported [6]. Here, sustainability is included by proposing a new metric that is based on the economic return on investment but also evaluates the contribution to sustainability. This new metric is denominated as the Sustainability Weighted Return on Investment metric (SWROIM). Extended forms of the metric have been proposed to include safety [7] and resilience [8]. As a fair allocation of resources is key for long-term sustainability, we propose a fair-sustainable approach that includes applying the fairness schemes along with the sustainability metric SWROIM for resource allocation in complex engineering systems that include economic, environmental, and social objectives.
This work uses this fair-sustainable approach for the optimization of an integrated system to produce fuels and simultaneously capture emissions. The involved stakeholders in the integrated system include refineries, biorefineries, and eco-industries (taken in this work as endeavors for forest plantations resulting in capturing emissions). To foster the reduction of emissions, we include economic compensations for the eco-industries. The optimal allocation of income among these stakeholders is evaluated by using different fairness schemes (social welfare, Rawlsian welfare, and Nash approaches) and the sustainability metric SWROIM. Furthermore, the avoided emissions and the generated jobs obtained through the distinct schemes are analyzed. To demonstrate the applicability of the optimization formulation, a case study that is relevant for the future planning of the energy system in Mexico has been presented. In the results, important differences are observed for the stakeholdersâ income allocation, as well as for the environmental and social functions under the fairness schemes and the sustainability metric. These differences highlight the importance of exploring and analyzing these possible allocations since they can be key for decision-makers to consider investing in a system or not. The results also show that the Nash scheme can provide fair trade-offs among the stakeholdersâ income and environmental and social functions.
