Development of a multi-leader multi-follower game to design industrial symbioses

Abstract

The implementation of industrial symbioses all over the world has been proven to be a significant lever to decarbonize production facilities. By enhancing cooperation and exchanging resources, important decrease of emissions can be achieved while reducing operating costs. In the light of our previous work, a game theory model is developed to design resources exchanges in eco-industrial parks (EIP). This new model allows to take into account each authority of an industrial park as an independent player, thus becoming a multi-leader-multi-follower game (MLMFG) model. Water and energy networks are generated simultaneously in the model through a well-known case study. The bi-level model is designed with the water and energy managers as leaders and the plants as followers. In this way, the plants play a Nash game with each other and so do the EIP managers. These managers choose a solution from among the equilibria of the followers before reaching their own equilibrium. The results obtained are then compared with those of the previous article, demonstrating that the MLMFG model provides fairly interesting conclusions for the factories and also for the authorities. The relative gain for the companies is around 30 % for all the factories, which constitutes a strong argument of fairness to convince them to participate in the symbiosis. The result obtained after solving the MLMFG problem is very different from that obtained using the AHP method on the set of feasible solutions. To demonstrate the decision-making aspect of the MLMFG method, the coefficients of the AHP method were identified to find the solution to the MLMFG problem among all the feasible points. It is shown that the coefficients are difficult to determine for an expert, despite the relevance of the solution found.