Inventory Management for industrial symbiosis: An agent-based simulation study / Applying a Core Ontology on Decision Making

Title: Inventory Management for industrial symbiosis: An agent-based simulation study - talk given by Luca Fraccascia

• Abstract: This seminar is aimed at presenting the paper titled “Inventory Management for industrial symbiosis: An agent-based simulation study”, authors Luca Fraccascia, Devrim M. Yazan, Vito Albino, and Henk Zijm. The paper concerns the strategy of resource stocking in industrial symbiosis, where companies use the waste from sometimes entirely different industries as a substitute for traditional input materials. As such, industrial symbiosis is a manifestation of the broader concept of the circular economy. As the waste is not produced upon demand but appears as a secondary output of another production activity, mismatch between waste supply and demand is mostly unavoidable. The aim of the paper is to investigate economic advantages provided by the practice of stocking wastes, in order to identify whether and in which conditions such advantages are higher than the burden of keeping inventories. Furthermore, the paper assesses the environmental benefits that companies can create via stocking wastes. An agent-based model is designed and integrated in an enterprise input-output model, in order to simulate the symbiotic relationships between companies, which can adopt several waste inventory strategies. A numerical study is used to show how the model works. Results indicate that stocking wastes is useful from the environmental perspective, while waste market dynamicity, inventory magnitude, and unitary costs to stock waste are critical factors that determine the economic feasibility of inventories in an industrial symbiosis business case. 

• Bio: Luca Fraccascia is assistant professor at Sapienza University of Rome and at IEBIS – University of Twente. He got the PhD in Mechanical and Management Engineering in 2017 at Polytechnic University of Bari and joined UT as a postdoctoral researcher, before the current position. His research is focused on the transition of our society towards the circular economy, using the theoretical lenses of industrial engineering. Luca is expert of industrial symbiosis, which addresses from the perspectives of supply chain management and business models. From the methodological perspective, Luca is expert of agent-based modeling.

Title: Applying a Core Ontology on Decision Making - talk given by Renata Guizzardi-Silva Souza

• Abstract: Decision Making is an important part of the everyday lives of individuals and organizations. Many works within Computer Science have focused on supporting this process, especially by developing decision-supporting systems. We argue that for providing better support to Decision Making, it is paramount to understand the nature of a decision and of the process that leads to it. To accomplish that, in this talk, we present our ongoing work on a core ontology on Decision Making. Aiming at creating a well-founded ontology, we rely on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), and we reuse some notions of existing ontologies on Value Proposition and Economic Preference. Besides describing the ontology, this seminar also discusses some possible applications, so as to illustrate how this ontology may be useful for distinct areas and purposes.

• Bio: Renata is currently an Assistant Professor at the Behavioral, Management and Social Sciences Faculty, (IEBIS group) of the University of Twente, in the Netherlands. Moreover, she is a founding member of the Ontology & Conceptual Modeling Research Group (NEMO) and of the Laboratory of Supporting Technologies for Collaborative Networks (LabTAR), at UFES, Brazil, where she held an Associate Professor position from 2009-2016. In 2006, she received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Twente in the Netherlands with a thesis entitled Agent-Oriented Constructivist Knowledge Management. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) in 2006 and 2018, and at the University of Trento in 2013-2014, Italy. In 2018, she was an Senior Associate Researcher at the University of Bristol, UK and in 2019, she was a lecturer at the University of Trento, Italy. Her main research interests include Collaborative Systems, Knowledge Management, Ontologies and Goal-oriented Modeling.