The editors of The Journal of Industrial Ecology asked me to speculate about this question in what we hope will become a regular column on modeling and simulation. My judgment is that many precedents offer encouragement. Continuous process industries, such as petrochemicals, have long sought to channel every input into profitable output. Chemical engineers already design and test refineries in detail on computers before companies buy the first length of pipe. In the many industries which produce in batches rather than in continuous flows, design and analysis of integrated manufacturing systems have also advanced markedly.
Leverage is a key word.
One major reason to formalize the flows and relations within a plant into equations and computer code founded on sound data is to assess numerically the power to achieve outcomes with practical effort. In a virtual plant we want to discover the levers connected to the task and resting on a fulcrum near the task. Above the level of the plant, fewer precedents for simulation exist. Nevertheless, Peter Ince's chart of the materials flowing from the forest into lumber, paper, and fuel invites simulation of the industrial ecology of wood products. The vast yet overlooked services industries appear to be virtual virgins.