Synthesis of water networks for industrial parks considering inter-plant allocation

•A “plant-based” mode is proposed for allocation of water across individual plants.•Direct and mixed integration ways are both studied.•Consider stream number limit at the building stage of network superstructures.•Avoid the overmuch connections and the resulted redundant solutions. Since an industrial park is a cluster of multiple company individuals, there is requirement to develop specific reuse strategies so as to improve the utilization of resources across plants. This article presents a ‘plant-based’ mode respecting to the water allocation problem within industrial parks. In the mode, mixers and splitters are involved to present the mixing, conveying and splitting operations for reusing streams across plants. Such that, the mixing possibilities can also be investigated and many redundant solutions can be avoided by considering the number limit of inter-plant stream connections at the building stage of network superstructures. On base of this mode, both direct and mixed (direct–indirect) integration scenarios are studied in this study. Superstructures are established and mathematically formulated aiming to minimum fresh water consumption as well as the total annualized cost. At last, three integration cases are explored based on an example from literature for illustration.