A Systematic Fuzzy-based Framework for Synthesis and Optimization of an Eco-Industrial Park (EIP) for Oil Palm Industry

Abstract

Cultivation of oil palm are commonly held in rural, which had caused the sustainability of rural areas become increasingly important and challenging due to the growth of challenges in environment and economical aspects in the industry. The development of sustainability in rural areas are very limited while environmental sustainability becomes one of the important issues within the process engineering industry, where reuse, recycle and recover the wastewater and nutrient are always being encouraged. To address this issue, the concept of Eco-Industrial Park (EIP) could be adopted where resources allocation and exchange could be done among the involved parties to ensure sufficient utilities and resources are fulfilled in the rural areas and then further promote environmental and economic sustainability. To ensure EIP is feasible, optimum resources allocation and exchange should be pre-determined to know the expected minimum profit of parties involved before any decisions made on the development of EIP in rural area while maintaining minimum carbon dioxide emission for environmental sustainability. A systematic framework is required to guide decision makers in solving this complicated problem. There are limited research works focused on the development of a systematic framework for the synthesis of an oil palm industry based EIP that involving nutrient recovery from the wastewater treatment. This leads to the objective of this work to develop a systematic framework to synthesize an oil palm industry based EIP considering the nutrient recovered from wastewater treatment. This framework also served as a guidance in determining the optimum resources allocation and exchange based on decision-making factors (e.g., deserved profit and carbon dioxide emission) for each of the possible combinations of the cooperating parties using fuzzy optimization approach. An oil palm based EIP case study has been solved to demonstrate the proposed framework. The results show the combination of water and wastewater treatment plant with power generation plant is the best combination in profit earning while maintaining reasonable carbon dioxide emission.