Towards circular economy implementation in manufacturing systems using a multi-method simulation approach to link design and business strategy

Abstract

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.

Application of industry 4.0 technologies in SMEs for ethical and sustainable operations: Analysis of challenges

“…It has become essential for easing reuse and recycle epitome. The closed-loop supply chain adds more sustainability benefits in comparison to the open-loop supply chain ( Lieder et al., 2017 ).…”

Insights on Multi-Agent Systems Applications for Supply Chain Management

“…All these features are well suited for MAS modelling, allowing for analyzing the complexities of this new paradigm and studying the impact of the reverse flow of used products (and its associated processes to restore value) on the classic forward flow of new products. This is still an emerging area of research, and there are only a few studies using MAS [38,[94][95][96][97][98].…”

Simulation Modelling of a Shift to Service-Based Offerings : Resource efficiency and operational implications in the context of the circular economy

“…There have been a few attempts to synthesise literature insights between product design and policy interactions, such as in the case of the EU eco-design regulation (Bundgaard et al, 2017) and the setting of mandatory product standards (Tecchio et al, 2017). Similarly, the scholarly literature studied the interactions between reverse supply networks and business models (Bressanelli et al, 2018), policies (Govindan and Hasanagic, 2018), interactions between CE business initiatives on regulations (Salmi et al, 2012;Fischer and Pascucci, 2017), or interactions between CE product design and business model strategies (Lieder et al, 2017;Franco, 2019).…”