Simulating a biorefinery ecosystem to manage and motivate sustainable regional nutrient circulation

Abstract

Creating an ecologically sustainable circulation of nutrients requires local solutions with commitment from all participating parties. Due to vast differences between various regions, it is very complicated, if not impossible, to create fair, simple, and applicable legislation that can consider all of these differences in a meaningful way. Thus, there is a need for clear and easy ways of developing sustainable and viable solutions locally, as well as communicating them with local community and all the way up to the supervising governmental representatives. To meet this need, we developed a simulation tool that allows the user to explore the effectiveness and impact of a local biorefinery in waste management. As an iterative model based on state machine agents, it can easily be modified for a multitude of scenarios with changes taking place over time, while considering the viewing points of all involved. In this article, we report the first version of this tool and demonstrate its usefulness in estimating suitable biogas reactor size in a biorefinery.