Blockchain-based transaction data structure design for process integration and industrial symbiosis system

Abstract

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) and Process Integration (PI) are important activities with the potential to save resource intake and environmental footprints. Process Integration has been done theoretically and in practice for several decades but is still missing an efficient tool for multi-actor documentation and information preservation. The current paper sets out to develop data structures and tool prototypes for data preservation and transaction recording in process designs and Industrial Symbiosis (IS) to support the advancement of decentralised information tracking. The blockchain concept is utilised in this paper, where the information on the key properties of the streams and process stages can be stored in a secured block, and the transaction of resources can be dealt with using the information from the chain of blocks. Each block can represent the actors of the process in the IS, and an actor can request to join the blockchain by mining the blocks and going through the Proof-of- Work (PoW) verification of the new block. This paper introduces several terms to formulate a proper blockchain to store the information and showcase a simple simulation of adding/removing blocks for an IS system. The illustrative case study demonstrates that the method can evaluate Industrial Symbiosis and Process Integration solutions and track the key properties of the streams and process stages, costs, revenues, and environmental footprints.