Combining Model-driven and Capability- driven Developments: A Case Study of Industrial Symbiosis

This paper reports on a practical case that involved the confluence of an industrial software development platform, based on the model-driven development paradigm and a research methodology and prototype set of tools, based on the notion of capability. The focus of the application is the development of a web-based industrial symbiosis platform. The outcome is an example of a successful alignment of business-facing aspects with those informatics constructs that ensure alignment of between goals and processes of an enterprise with its support IT system. 1 Context of the Case This paper reports on an industrial case that has been developed using a combination of (a) an existing software development platform based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDD) paradigm and (b) the method and tools that have arisen as a result of a project funded by the European Commission. This industrial case was carried out by CLMS (UK) Ltd, a software technologies company. The work reported in this paper involved a software service from the area of industrial symbiosis, henceforth referred to as i-symbiosis. This is essentially a specialized capability that acts as “enabler of web industrial symbiosis”. Industrial symbiosis (IS) is an association between two or more industrial actors in which the wastes or by-products of one become the raw materials for another. This collaboration between two or more companies is called a synergy. Industrial symbiosis brings together companies from different business sectors, with the aim to improve cross-industry resource efficiency through the commercial trading of: waste materials, energy and water, sharing of processes and assets such as logistics and expertise. As a result, waste across a wide range of industrial activities, including chemicals, plastic, biomass, electronic and plastic, is reduced, and costs in raw materials, waste discharge and energy consumption are saved. Traditionally, experts and consultants, involving highly complex, labor-intensive and error-prone tasks that often lead to problematic and sub-optimal reuse of available resources, performed industrial symbiosis mediation process for the matching between producers and consumers manually. For the i-symbiosis service we considered such an exchange amongst firms as being organized "virtually" across a broader region, taking into consideration three contextual factors that are key to industrial symbiosis, namely those of location, resources and legislation. The key phases of i-symbiosis are depicted in Figure 1. Figure 1 IS Key phases Waste providers must insert to the platform their available resources and their type along with other resource-details (Phase 1 & Phase 2). In the 3 phase, the waste provider searches for interesting parties (waste engagers). An industrial symbiosis 1 This platform is a proprietary platform for the CLMS (UK) Company, known as zAppDev, details of which can be found in http://www.zappdev.com. 2 Information about this project, known as CaaS (Capability as a Service) can be found in http://caas-project.eu. Proceedings of CBI 2016 Industrial Track 13 platform has to match automatically the provided type of resources to suitable exchange resources and track the available industries, which can act as resource engagers. After the matching process, the waste provider selects one or more of the available matching results to start a synergy. Within the Synergy collaboration, the two interesting parties (waste providers and waste engagers) negotiate about the waste exchange. The last stage in the platform is to report the status of the synergy. Whether successful or not, a report is created which demonstrates the synergy timeline and the arguments supporting either the success or the failure of the synergy. By the end of this industrial symbiosis workflow, the platform creates a “case study” upon the synergy collaboration based on the report. We considered the provision of service of i-symbiosis as being possible through the capability “enabler of web industrial symbiosis”. This was further analyzed in terms of three capabilities: (a) determining relevance rating, (b) resource description and classification and (c) compliance with regulations. For (a) automated adjustments were considered based on location context; for (b) semi-automated adjustments were considered towards resource monitoring; and finally for (c) manual adjustments were considered for legislation handling. 2 The Business Environment of CLMS 2.