Evaluating environmental strategies in a textile printing and dyeing enterprise by an agent-based simulation model.

To improve the capabilities of saving energy and reducing pollutant emission of textile printing and dyeing (PD) industry, this article presents a novel agent-based simulation model for assessing the impacts of environmental strategies on a PD enterprise. Two typical PD enterprises in China are simulated with different modelling granularities: one is at a module level, while the other is at an enterprise level. The module-level simulation model depicts detailed production processes in a PD enterprise and evaluates five candidate strategies on their capabilities of improving energy usage and waste emission. The enterprise-level simulation model views a PD enterprise as an agent and assesses three tax strategies for waste discharge. The simulation results show that the proposed general model could be a valuable tool to explore potential solutions to saving energy and reducing waste emission in PD enterprises, after being calibrated to a real case. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]