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The recent circular economy movement has raised awareness and interest about untapped environmental and economic potential in the manufacturing industry. One of the crucial aspects in the implementation of circular or closedloop manufacturing approach is the design of circular products. While it is obvious that three post-use strategies, i.e., reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling, are highly relevant to achieve loop closure, it is enormously challenging to choose "the right" strategy (if at all) during the early design stage and especially at the single component level. One reason is that economic and environmental impacts of adapting these strategies are not explicit as they vary depending on the chosen business model and associated supply chains. In this scenario, decision support is essential to motivate adaptation of regenerative design strategies. The main purpose of this paper is to provide reliable decision support at the intersection of multiple lifecycle design and business models in the circular economy context to identify effects on cost and CO 2 emissions. The development of this work consists of a systematic method to quantify design effort for different circular design options through a multi-method simulation approach. The simulation model combines an agent-based product architecture and a discrete event closed-loop supply chain model. Feasibility of the model is tested using a case of a washing machine provided by Gorenje d.d. Firstly, design efforts for reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling are quantified. Secondly, cost and emissions of different design options are explored with different business model configurations. Finally, an optimization experiment is run to identify the most cost-effective combination of reused, remanufactured, and recycled components for a business model chosen on the basis of the explorative study results.

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Achieving a sustainable consumption and production pattern is one of the United Nation's sustainable development goals for 2030. To achieve this, it is necessary to consider the environmental burden from a product life cycle and the quality of life of the consumer. In this study, a systematic approach for connecting basic human needs and the product development process, called the living-sphere approach, is proposed. This approach is intended to encompass the complete relationship between region-specific basic needs and durable products. In this approach, value graphs, which visualize the value system of products, are connected to satisfiers fulfilling the basic needs set out by Max-Neef. A value graph links satisfiers and the traditional product development process. The significance of the proposed approach is twofold. First, improving quality of daily life and traditional product development are combined in the same framework. Second, the design of single products and the total optimization of multi-products are supported at the requirement level.

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This paper introduces an agent-based approach to study customer behavior in terms of their acceptance of new business models in Circular Economy (CE) context. In a CE customers are perceived as integral part of the business and therefore customer acceptance of new business models becomes crucial as it determines the successful implementation of CE. However, tools or methods are missing to capture customer behavior to assess how customers will react if an organization introduces a new business model such as leasing or functional sales. The purpose of this research is to bring forward a quantitative analysis tool for identifying proper marketing and pricing strategies to obtain best fit demand behavior for the chosen new business model. This tool will support decision makers in determining the impact of introducing new (circular) business models. The model has been developed using an agent-based modeling approach which delivers results based on socio-demographic factors of a population and customers' relative preferences of product attributes price, environmental friendliness and service-orientation. The implementation of the model has been tested using the practical business example of a washing machine. This research presents the first agent-based tool that can assess customer behavior and determine whether introduction of new business models will be accepted or not and how customer acceptance can be influenced to accelerate CE implementation. The tool integrates socio-demographic factors, product utility functions, social network structures and inter-agent communication in order to comprehensively describe behavior on individual customer level. In addition to the tool Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10458-017-9365-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. itself the results of this research indicates the need for systematic marketing strategies which emphasize CE value propositions in order to accelerate customer acceptance and shorten the transition time from linear to circular. Agent-based models are emphasized as highly capable to fill the gap between diffusion-based penetration of information and resulting behavior in the form of purchase decisions.

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