Research On Industrial Chain Design Of Construction Industrial Parks Through Industrial Symbiosis

The rapid development of the construction industry in China is causing problems.Prominent among these are low utilization efficiency of resources,and environmental disruption and degradation.Traditional construction methods are dominated by laborintensive approaches involving the use of considerable onsite labor.However,recent labor shortages in the industry,have resulted in insufficient workers being available to undertake traditional construction projects.Consequentially,these problems have led to significant setbacks in the development of China’s economy and society.The question of how best to reinvigorate construction activities to reinstate efficiency as well as sustainability has become a major topic of interest,both among academics and practitioners.Offsite construction is one such inventive solution,offering clear advantages.Benefits from using offsite technologies have been widely studied and they mainly include reductions in cost,time,defects,health and safety risks,environmental impact,while offering increases in predictability,whole life performance and profits.In recent years,with the development of offsite construction,clustering of construction companies into construction industrial parks(CIPs)has been adopted in China.CIPs are clusters of offsite construction companies that provide a platform for such industrial activities.In CIPs,collections of construction manufacturing and service businesses are assembled,and then put together on a common property.While many CIPs already exist in China,the next iteration of ecological CIPs that combine efficiency with sustainable industrial development,are now being implemented where the concept of industrial symbiosis(IS)is applied to existing CIPs to obtain environmental and economic benefits by sharing resources.Strategies for designing a symbiotic network between companies in a CIP involves selection of tenants to complement existing offsite construction companies.However,eco-designs of Chinese CIPs rarely consider the potential integration of tenants in an ecoindustrial park(EIPs)framework.The offsite construction-based firms,at the heart of the CIP,acts as the anchor tenants and provides synergistic collaborative network between various industries on specific by-product streams.A method of quantitative evaluation for candidate tenants can effectively reduce negative environmental impacts on the CIP system.Hence,in view of the importance in the selection of suitable member enterprises for an EIP program,this study aims to establish an evaluation model which provides a practice tool for the optimal design of CIPs.To be more specific,the objectives of this study are:(i)to establish an access indicator system for candidate tenants of CIPs.The access indicator system,proposed from the perspective of the park-based level,comprises three primary indicators and fifteen secondary indicators;and(ii)to provide a quantitative method for evaluating the suitability of an enterprise integrating into a CIP.This evaluation model is utilized to represent multiple objective functions such as designing a food chain network of the CIP,minimizing the environmental footprint of the CIP,and maximizing the annualized profit of the CIP.To demonstrate the proposed model,a case study of a CIP project is presented in this work where the potential prospective tenants joining the industrial park are selected.The robustness of the proposed method is validated in the case study.The work offers practical contributions to industry by providing a tool for selecting tenants that enhances the ecodesign of CIPs.