Sustainable operations of industrial symbiosis: an enterprise input-output model integrated by agent-based simulation

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a key for implementing circular economy. Through IS, wastes produced by one company are used as inputs by other companies. The operations of IS suffers from uncertainty barriers since wastes are not produced upon demand but emerge as secondary outputs. Such an uncertainty, triggered by waste supply-demand quantity mismatch, influences IS business dynamics. Accordingly, companies have difficulty to foresee potential costs and benefits of implementing IS. The paper adopts an enterprise input-output model providing a cost–benefit analysis of IS integrated to an agent-based model to simulate how companies share the total economic benefits stemming from IS. The proposed model allows to explore the space of cooperation, defined as the operationally favourable conditions to operate IS in an economically win-win manner. This approach, as a decision-support tool, allows the user to understand whether the IS relationship is created and how should the cost-sharing policy be. The proposed model is applied to a numerical example. Findings show that cost-sharing strategies are dramatically affected by waste supply-demand mismatch and by the relationship between saved and additional costs to run IS. Apart from methodological and theoretical contributions, the paper proposes managerial and practical implications for business strategy development in IS

Simulating a physical internet enabled mobility web: the case of mass distribution in France

International audiencePhysical Internet (PI, π) is a novel concept aiming to render more economically, environmentally and socially efficient and sustainable the way physical objects are transported, handled, stored, realized, supplied and used throughout the world. It enables, among other webs, the Mobility Web which deals with moving physical objects within an interconnected set of unimodal and multimodal hubs, transits, ports, roads and ways. We want to develop and use holistic simulations to study and quantify the impact in terms of economical, environmental, and social efficiency and performance of evolving from the current system of freight transportation toward an open logistics web in France. This paper focuses on how the mobility web simulator supporting this study was designed and developed. The simulator produces large-scale simulations of mobility webs consisting of a large number of companies, sites and agents dealing with thousands of daily orders. It supports route and rail transportation modes, pallets and PI-containers for product shipping, different kinds of routing and shipping strategies, and various types of hubs

STRATEGIC PRODUCT DESIGN DECISIONS FOR UNCERTAIN, CONVERGING AND SERVICE ORIENTED MARKETS

Market driven product design decisions are receiving increasing attention in the engineering design research literature. Econometric models and marketing research techniques are being integrated into engineering design in order to assist with profit maximizing product design decisions. This stream of research is referred to as "Design for Market Systems" (DMS). The existing DMS approaches fall short when the market environment is complex. The complexity can be incurred by the uncertain action-reactions of market players which impose unexpected market responses to a new design. The complexity can originate from the emergence of a niche product which creates a new product market by integrating the features of two or more existing products categories. The complexity can also arise when the designer is challenged to handle the couplings of outsourced subsystems from suppliers and explore the integration of the product with service providers. The objective of the thesis is to overcome such limitations and facilitate design decisions by modeling and interpreting the complex market environment. The research objective is achieved by three research thrusts. Thrust 1 examines the impact of action-reactions of market players on the long and short term design decisions for single category products using an agent based simulation approach. Thrust 2 concerns the design decisions for "convergence products". A convergence product physically integrates two or more existing product categories into a common product form. Convergence products make the consumer choice behavior and profit implications of design alternatives differ significantly from the situation where only a single product market is involved. Thrust 3 explores product design decisions while considering the connection to the upstream suppliers and downstream service providers. The connection is achieved by a quantitative understanding of interoperability of physical product modules as well as between a physical product and a service provider