Multi-dimensional and multi-level assessment of circular economy strategies in manufacturing systems

Abstract

A manufacturing system can simultaneously exploit more strategies from the Circular Economy paradigm, such as reduction, reuse, repair, refurbishment, and remanufacturing. These strategies involve finished products, raw materials, and components, and each adopted strategy can unpredictably impact the system performance along one or more dimensions (technical, economic, and environmental) at both the planning and the life cycle levels. This paper deepens the simultaneous measurement of the multi-dimensional and multi-level (strategic and tactical planning and life cycle design) performance of the manufacturing system in the presence of circular economy strategies. The Multi-layer Enterprise Input-Output (MEIO) formalisation method is extended to integrate Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) approaches to perform scenario analyses. The proposed approach is applied to a numerical example to show the impacts of adopting new processes for circular economy strategies in a brownfield context. The considered scenarios combine different circular economic strategies applied to different levels of the Bill of Materials of a multi-product environment. The proposed approach can help practitioners and production managers evaluate adopting circular economy strategies. Moreover, the approach can support the development of methods for simultaneous multi-dimensional performance assessment of manufacturing systems at the operational level.