BE: MUSES: Modeling Eco-Industrial Symbiosis: Greening of Regional Industrial Materials Networks

这项名为“环境中的生物复杂性：材料使用：科学、工程和社会”（MUSES）的研究旨在开发新的工具来评估和优化世界城市地区的工业网络。世界城市区域是物质、水和能源的巨大消化器，在物质消耗和废物排放的线性系统中起着中间节点的作用。在工业地区，从线性系统到循环系统的持续转变为减少生产和服务行业对环境的不利影响带来了巨大的希望。通过拟议的研究开发的工具将有助于设计替代性区域工业网络，以实现生态-工业共生的目标。在工业地理学家、区域计量经济学家、逆向物流和生态工业园区开发的合作下，努力的主要领域是工业生态学。该小组将尝试综合这些领域的模型和数据集，并将在一个区域工业网络中发展废物和副产品流动的业务模型。通过与一些主要城市基础设施的代表性公司进行一系列讨论，结果将得到证实。这项工作将作为概念研究的证明，澄清进行全面建模和分析所需的额外专业知识。南加州大学的NSF综合研究生教育研究和培训（IGERT），“可持续城市计划”（SCP）将协调多学科之间的努力。该计划已经资助了来自与可持续发展相关的各个领域的几名本科生和研究生。提出的项目为SCP在理论和应用工业生态学方面培养和教育本科生和博士生提供了新的机会。

This Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE) for: Materials Use: Science, Engineering, and Society (MUSES) study aims to develop new tools to assess and optimize industrial networks in world city-regions. World city-regions are enormous digesters of material, water and energy, functioning as intermediate nodes in linear systems of material consumption and waste discharge. An ongoing transition from linear to looped systems in industrial regions holds great promise for reducing adverse human impacts of production and service industries on the environment. The tool to be developed through the proposed research will facilitate the design of alternative regional industrial networks with the objective of achieving an eco-industrial symbiosis. The overarching field of endeavor is industrial ecology with collaborations from industrial geographers, regional econometricians, reverse logistics and eco-industrial park development. The team will attempt integration of models and data sets from these fields and will develop an operational model of waste and by-product flows in a regional industrial network. The results will be ground-truthed through a series of discussions with a number of representative firms in a major urban infrastructure.This work will function as a proof of concept research, clarifying additional expertise needed to carry out a full-scale modeling and analysis. USC's NSF Integrated Graduate Education Research and Training (IGERT), "Sustainable Cities Program" (SCP) will coordinate the efforts among the multiple disciplines. The Program already funds several undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of fields related to sustainable development. The proposed project presents new opportunities for the SCP to train and educate undergraduate students and doctoral fellows in theoretical and applied industrial ecology.