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Industrial Sectors Integrated Solutions (ISIS) Model

EPA’s Industrial Sectors Integrated Solutions ISIS is a sector-based dynamic programming model developed to facilitate the analyses of emission-reduction strategies for multiple pollutants for several U.S. industrial sectors.

Specifications

Version 0.0
Release Date December 2011
Development Status general release
Development Information  
Operating System UNIX, DOS
Development Language  
Intended Audience  
Key Words  
Related Web Sites  


General Purpose ISIS

In the National Academy of Science’s 2004 report, “Air Quality Management in the United States,” the National Research Council recommended to EPA that standard setting, planning, and control strategy development should be based on integrated assessments that consider multiple pollutants, and that these integrated assessments should be conducted in a comprehensive and coordinated manner (NAS 2004). With these recommendations, EPA began to move toward establishing multi-pollutant and sector-based approaches to manage air quality and environmental protection. The benefits of multi-pollutant and sector-based analyses and approaches include the ability to identify optimum strategies (considering feasibility, costs, and benefits across all pollutant types such as criteria, toxics, and others), while streamlining administrative and compliance complexities and reducing conflicting and redundant requirements.

The development of policy options for managing emissions and air quality can be made more effective and efficient through sophisticated analyses of relevant technical and economic factors. Such analyses are greatly enhanced by the use of an appropriate modeling framework. Accordingly, ISIS has been developed at EPA. Currently, ISIS is populated with U.S. cement manufacturing data, and efforts are underway to build representations of the U.S. pulp and paper sector and the U.S. iron and steel sector.

Criteria air pollutants, air toxics and greenhouse gases ISIS takes into account plant-level economic and technical factors such as the type of emission units (for cement–kiln), associated capacity, location, cost of production, applicable controls, and their costs. For each of the emission-reduction strategies under consideration, the model is able to provide information on the following:

ISIS design allows for incorporating multiple industries within a multi-market, multi-product, multi-pollutant, and multi-region emissions trading framework. The objective function in ISIS maximizes total surplus and uses an elastic formulation of the demand function to estimate area under the demand curve.

The ISIS code is written in the General Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS) language. Input data, organized in various spreadsheets of a Microsoft Excel workbook, are passed on to the GAMS files. These input data consist of an industry database, which provides unit-level production, capacity, production cost, and emissions information. The controls database provides information regarding applicable air pollution control technologies and their cost and emission-control characteristics. A policy module is used to specify various parameters of interest to the policy analyst, such as emissions cap, emission reduction scenarios, and discount rate. The input data, control data, and policy parameters are then transmitted to the optimization part of the ISIS model, where they are used to solve the selected base and policy cases. After solving, the results are post-processed to calculate values of various outputs of interest. The output data are exported to Excel spreadsheets for further analyses and graphical representation of selected results.

Publications

ISIS-Cement Documentation

ISIS-Cement NESHAP/NSPS Analysis (ISIS Analysis for the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants and New Source Performance Standards for the Portland Cement Industry)

 

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