Yale School of the Environment, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States of America.
J. Mike Walker 66' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2022 May 19;17(5):e0267431. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0267431. eCollection 2022.
Configuring the network connections in industrial, power, and water networks to mimic the structural patterns of ecological food webs has been shown to improve the resilience of human networks. This work investigates the ability of food web inspiration to specifically guide the incorporation of renewable energy and water sources for resilience. Feasibility is tested using the water and electricity networks of the Texas A&M University main campus, demonstrating the potential of university campus case studies as analogies for other multi-use networks, such as cities or industrial-commercial regions, due to the variety of functions met within the system boundaries. Ecological robustness, the unique and characteristic behavior of ecosystems to slightly favor redundancy over efficiency, is used to correlate the incorporation and supply-levels of solar power and rainwater collection in a realistic campus model with the overall resilience of the electricity and domestic water networks. Non-obviously, the results suggest that the ecologically-similar resilience is achieved when less than 100% of utilities come from renewable sources, indicating an important potential tradeoff between efforts to shift to 100% renewable sources and network resilience concerns.
将工业、电力和供水网络中的连接进行配置，以模拟生态食物网的结构模式，已被证明可以提高人类网络的弹性。这项工作研究了受食物网启发来具体指导可再生能源和水资源的纳入以提高弹性的能力。使用德克萨斯 A&M 大学主校区的水和电力网络进行了可行性测试，由于系统边界内满足的各种功能，该研究表明大学校园案例研究可以作为其他多用途网络（如城市或工业商业区域）的类比。生态稳健性是指生态系统的独特和特征性行为，即稍微偏向冗余而不是效率，用于将太阳能和雨水收集在现实校园模型中的纳入和供应水平与电力和家庭用水网络的整体弹性相关联。结果表明，当不到 100%的公用事业来自可再生能源时，就可以实现具有生态相似性的弹性，这表明在努力转向 100%可再生能源和网络弹性问题之间存在重要的潜在权衡。
