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

循环经济旨在通过使用循环的流程和商业模式，逐步改变我们传统的线性生产和消费模式，使产品、过程副产品、报废产品和能源等资源不被浪费或损失。这种向更可持续的商业流程和社会的转变是必要的，也是雄心勃勃的。传统的供应链模式必须进行调整和转型，以更好地满足有限资源和严格环保法规的社会需求。这将带来新的商业模式和组织，它们将更有效地利用回收、再利用和共享的材料、产品和能源，以及更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（如汽车共享）、工业生态（如副产品交换）、共享经济（如消费者对消费者资源共享）、EOL产品再利用和回收（如废物和二手产品的逆向物流）。为了提高效率，这些新的业务流程和组织的设计和操作必须考虑到它们的社会技术性质，因为人和技术的交互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。不正确处理这些特殊性可能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机交互影响的一种方法是使用先进的基于仿真的决策支持工具。本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行新的社会技术业务流程和循环经济组织，从而为循环经济的进步做出贡献。更具体地说，本研究项目旨在开发和评估基于Agent-Based Simulation （ABS）的计算方法，以建模、研究、设计和改进循环经济策略。特别是，该项目将创建先进的仿真模型，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（例如玻璃容器收集网络、汽车共享网络）整合在一起，以评估其性能并改进其设计和操作。换句话说，该程序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，新兴现象），并为这些系统的设计，改进和操作规定有效的方案或策略。该项目将培养四个行业循环经济战略设计和运营方面的专家，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.