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

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.