Collaborative lot-sizing for industrial symbiosis

Industrial symbiosis is promoted as a sustainable approach to convert production residues into value-added products. By-product synergy is a specific configuration within an industrial symbiosis system, where by-products from a production unit are used as raw materials by another. This exchange occurs between two or more companies (related or autonomous), requiring alignment of lot sizing decisions among all involved actors. To address this joint production planning problem, we focus on framing symbiotic partnerships within a by-product synergy network involving one supplier and one receiver of by-products. Collaboration policies can vary across different industrial symbiosis scenarios. In this paper, we investigate several collaboration policies for various levels of information sharing using different approaches: (i) centralized and decentralized collaboration policies based on mixed-integer programming for full and no information sharing, (ii) a contract-based collaboration policy using game theory for one-sided asymmetric information sharing, and (iii) a contract-based collaboration policy obtained via a negotiation scheme managed by a blind mediator for multilateral asymmetric information sharing.