General Methodology for Action-Oriented Industrial Ecology Complex Systems Approach Applied to the Rotterdam Industrial Cluster

A new approach for the understanding and shaping of the evolution of large scale socio-technical systems is presented. A proof-of-concept knowledge application has been developed, based on the industrial Rotterdam-Rijnmond case. The knowledge application includes the design of a model of industry-infrastructure evolution. Such networks are modeled via a system decomposition, formalization in an ontology and implementation of an agent based model. In simulation runs several network metrics are presented. The results provide insights in real world system behavior and show the validity and potential of the approach