Advanced Simulation Tools for the Design and Operation of Circular Economy Strategies

循环经济旨在通过使用循环流程和商业模式，逐步将我们传统的线性生产和消费模式转变为一种社会模式，在这种社会模式中，产品、工艺副产品、报废产品和能源等资源不会浪费或损失。这种向更可持续的业务流程和社会转型既是必要的，也是雄心勃勃的。传统的供应链模式将不得不进行调整和改造，以更好地满足有限资源和严格的环境保护法规的社会需求。这将导致新的商业模式和组织，这些模式和组织将更加节约资源，使用回收、再利用和共享的材料、产品和能源以及较少的自然资源来满足需求。这些举措将采取多种形式，包括智能物流和移动性(例如汽车共享)、产业生态(例如副产品交换)、共享经济(例如消费者对消费者资源共享)、在线产品再利用和回收(例如废物和二手产品的逆向物流)。为了有效，这些新的业务流程和组织的设计和运作必须考虑到其社会技术性质，因为人与技术的互动以及复杂的人类行为和决策模式往往是这些机会的驱动因素。如果处理不好这些特殊性，可能会导致循环经济战略效率低下，甚至失败。评估循环经济战略中人-技术互动影响的一种方法是使用先进的基于模拟的决策支持工具。该研究计划的长期目标是通过开发决策支持系统来帮助设计和运营循环经济的新的社会技术业务流程和组织，从而为循环经济的进步做出贡献。更具体地说，本研究计划旨在开发和评估基于基于代理的模拟(ABS)的计算方法，以建模、研究、设计和改进循环经济战略。特别是，该计划将创建高级模拟模型，将特定环境中的人类行为(例如，EOL产品回收的分类决策、移动策略选择)和业务流程(例如，玻璃集装箱收集网络、汽车共享网络)整合在一起，以评估其性能并改进其设计和运营。换句话说，该计划将创建复杂社会技术系统的虚拟表示，可用于更好地理解和预测这些系统的适当性(例如，性能、新出现的现象)，并为这些系统的设计、改进和运行制定有效的方案或政策。该项目将培训四个行业领域的循环经济战略设计和操作方面的四名专家，以及先进的复杂系统仿真技术。

Circular Economy aims to progressively transform our traditional linear pattern of production and consumption towards a model of society where resources, such as products, process by-products, end-of-life (EOL) products, and energy are not wasted or lost, through the use of circular processes and business models. This transformation towards more sustainable business processes and societies is as necessary as it is ambitious. Traditional supply chain models will have to be adapted and transformed to better meet society's demand with limited resources and strict environmental protection regulations. This will lead to new business models and organizations that will be more resource efficient to meet demand using recycled, reused and shared material, products and energy, and less natural resources. These initiatives will take many forms, including smart logistics and mobility (e.g. car sharing), industrial ecology (e.g. by-products exchange), sharing economy (e.g. consumer-to-consumer resource sharing), EOL product reuse and recycling (e.g. reverse logistics of waste and used products). In order to be effective, the design and operation of these new business processes and organizations must take into consideration their sociotechnical nature, as human and technology interactions, and complex human behaviours and decision patterns, are often the drivers of these opportunities. Not addressing these particularities properly may lead to inefficient Circular Economy strategies, or even failure. An approach to assess the impacts of human-technology interactions in Circular Economy strategies is to use advanced simulation-based decision support tools. The long-term objective of this research program is to contribute to the progress of Circular Economy by developing decision support systems to help design and operate the new sociotechnical business processes and organizations of the Circular Economy. More specifically, this research program aims to develop and evaluate computational methods based on Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) to model, study, design and improve Circular Economy strategies. In particular, this program will create advanced simulation models that integrate human behaviour in specific environments (e.g. sorting decision for EOL product recycling, mobility strategy selection), and business processes (e.g. glass container collection network, car-sharing network) to assess their performance and improve their design and operation. In other words, the program will create virtual representation of complex sociotechnical systems that can be used to better understand and predict the propriety (e.g. performance, emerging phenomenon) of these systems, and to prescribe efficient scenarios or policies for the design, improvement and operation of these systems. This program will train four experts in the design and operations of Circular Economy strategies in four industry sectors, and advanced complex system simulation technic.