Definition of the ecopark's multi-criteria decision-making problems and their challenges

Mathilde Le Tellier (1) , Lamia Berrah (1) , Vincent Cliville (1) , Benoît Stutz (2) , Jean-François Audy (3) , Simon Barnabé (4)

1 LISTIC - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Systèmes, Traitement de l'Information et de la Connaissance
2 Génome, Population, Interactions
3 ULaval - Université Laval [Québec]
4 UQTR - Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

An ecopark is defined as "a community of businesses (of all sizes, from the industrial or service sectors) located on a business park planned and built in a sustainable approach, that cooperate with each other and with the local community to efficiently share information, materials, energy, infrastructure or services (for the companies or the employees), leading to economic environmental and social gains for the businesses and the local community." [Le Tellier et al., 2019]. This emerging archetype attempts to provide an answer to, the economic, environmental and social shortcomings faced by mixed industrial parks in Europe and North America [Lambert et Boons, 2002]. Such a vision of ecoparks leads to the handling of two important features.  An ecopark is built around cooperation between companies one the one hand and between companies and local communities on the other hand.  An ecopark is designed and built following the principles of sustainable urban planning, which includes the development of buildings, the use of land and the design of urban infrastructures such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks. An ecopark is controlled by a designated manager:  on behalf of a variety of stakeholders (resident companies, their employees, the local community, the environment);  at different stages of its lifecycle (design, construction, operation, retrofit, expansion);  at different timespans (form very short-term to long-term). Essentially, the ecopark's control consists of deciding about a collection of actions which aims at achieving its finality, that is sustainability. Sustainability is interpreted in its consensual way, as the conjunction of its three pillars [World Commission On Environment and Development, 1987]. Hence, sustainability is handled according to three overall criteria to which three goals are associated, respectively:  reducing the environmental impact of the ecopark site;  generating economic benefits from the ecopark operating;  generating social benefits from the ecopark operating. In accordance with industrial continuous performance improvement approaches and the Deming wheel principle (Plan-Do-Check-Act), the ecopark's control requires an expression of its performance based on the declaration and the decomposition of its goals in order to define an adequate action plan. The definition of actions can be interpreted as the choice, among a set of potential actions, of the adequate action or set of actions to improve the ecopark's performance. Keeping in mind that this performance is expressed within multiple criteria, resulting from the sustainability overall criteria, each action typically offers advantages and disadvantages respectively to each criterion, timespan or stakeholder. In summary, in the ecopark's control context, the definition of the action plan can be seen as a decision process that includes both choice and sorting decision-making problem. Since an ecopark is both a park, designed and built in a sustainable way, and a community of collaborating companies, we postulate that two action plans can be defined to reach its goals: one with actions related to the sustainable planning of the site and one with actions relating to the companies' collaboration. Those two action plans relate to different lifecycle stages. Indeed, the sustainable planning of the site mostly concerns the ecopark's design, construction, retrofit and expansion, and the companies'

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Mathilde Le Tellier, Lamia Berrah, Vincent Cliville, Benoît Stutz, Jean-François Audy, et al.. Definition of the ecopark's multi-criteria decision-making problems and their challenges. 89th meeting of the EURO Working Group in Multi Criteria Decision Aiding (EWG-MCDA), Apr 2019, Trento, Italy. ⟨hal-02111473⟩