Conference Agenda

For industries transitioning to circular economy, understanding the business case is essential. This paper highlights key business model factors for remanufacturing within a heavy truck manufacturer. Twenty-six interviews were held, the barriers to profitability were identified as cost structure, key resources and cores and key activities. Applying systems engineering principles can help translate business needs into requirements, mitigate complexity and align stakeholders for effective transformation. Recommended future research is to investigate partnerships, profitability, and model design.

This paper presents a novel research and development framework for “Design for R” (DfR), which aims to systematically translate R strategies into actionable targets in engineering design. Building on the principles of Design for X and guided by the Design Research Methodology, it outlines a comprehensive research structure for developing, testing, and iteratively refining the DfR approach. The goal is to facilitate specific and robust technical solutions as well as practically applicable sustainability integration at the product level through structured methods, tools, and design principles.

This paper shows the implementation of the Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA) as a Life Cycle Assessment simplification (LCA) method to identify the most influential design parameters for the design of packaging reuse loops. The practical execution of GSA relies on Monte Carlo simulations to propagate the input parameter effects in the LCA model and Sobol indexes to quantify the variance contribution of each parameter. This methodology was applied to a case study in the French region of Île-de-France. This method allows identify the key design parameters to prioritize the design key decisions.

Remanufacturing can be facilitated by design activities considering value creation, preservation, and recovery. Design-related decisions for remanufacturing can affect the performance of business models, but there is a lack of literature to identify these barriers or enablers. Through an analysis of selected remanufacturing cases, an initial step to bridge this gap is provided. Findings highlight the potential of design for remanufacturing for enhanced value creation processes and new service offerings, and present recurrent barriers and enablers to remanufacturing in the cases.