1,721,088 research outputs found
Towards a Circular Manufacturing Competency Model: Analysis of the State of the Art and Development of a Model
No full textAnalysis of information systems as empowering tools in Circular Manufacturing
Full text linkCircular Economy (CE) adoption, especially in manufacturing, is gaining momentum thanks to its potentials in enhancing environmental, social and economic sustainability of this sector. In this context, CE is also named as Circular Manufacturing (CM), and by relying on several strategies it allows to reduce resource consumption and to extend their lifecycle towards lowering the greenhouse gases emissions too. The adoption of CM, among all, requires managerial, organizational, and technological changes and supports. In particular, in the scientific literature, researchers underlined the relevant role that digital technologies, spanning from Industry 4.0-related technologies to software and information systems, have in the implementation of CM with a special attention on data. Although this general awareness is present, in the scientific literature is still scarce research dealing with information systems usage to empower manufacturing companies in embracing CM. Therefore, the present contribution, based on both scientific and grey literature, aims to structure the extant contributions by elucidating which information systems can support CM adoption, by underling their role in respect to the specific CM strategy embraced by the company and the potential benefits obtained. In particular, the present contribution shows which information systems can be used for the advancements of the manufacturing companies’ daily activities covering the aspects characterizing CM without being limited to economic benefits only. As a conclusive remark, this research not only aims to cover a research gap, but it empowers practitioners creating awareness about the importance of technological investments to keep high their companies’ competitive advantage including CE values in their strategic plans
Circular economy in the manufacturing sector as enabler of sustainable manufacturing
Full text linkThe role of manufacturers for our society is gaining importance more and more, and currently the manufacturing is considered one of the most polluting and resource greedy sectors. The inefficiencies registered in manufacturing boost the uncontrollable rise of resources consumption and the rise of CO2 emissions, which nowadays represent two of the major problems affecting the society. To tackle these issues, policymakers have promoted the sustainable developed goals (SDG) and, both industry and scientific literature have started to investigate the potentialities of sustainable manufacturing to address this goals. More recently the attention has been moved over a new economy, called “circular economy” (CE). This paradigm, characterised by specific principles, aims to design systems allowing the regeneration and restoration of resources. The present work aims to elucidate how CE paradigm operates as driver of sustainable manufacturing through the adoption by manufacturers of different CE strategies. Indeed, this contribution presents how the CE principles have been translated in the manufacturing context through specific strategies, by highlighting their economic, environmental and social potentialities to embrace the SDGs. Understanding what are the applicable CE strategies and their sustainable potentialities would facilitate the transition towards circular industries by making manufacturers more aware of the possible paths to be undertaken and related benefits. This paper is based on a literature review, grounded on English-written documents available on Scopus and Web of Science. Moreover, this review, on the basis of the scientific literature gaps, paves the way for future research directions
A literature review on circular economy adoption in the manufacturing sector
Full text linkThis paper aims to investigate how the sustainable development is pursued by manufacturing companies according to the extant literature, especially by focusing on Circular Economy (CE) paradigm that is considered one of the major drivers for sustainability. Indeed, this research aims to study how CE principles have been adopted in the manufacturing sector leading towards the creation of Circular Manufacturing (CM) strategies. To achieve this goal, a systematic literature review has been conducted. Scopus and Web of Science are the scientific databases used for the review process. The 215 papers selected for the review were analysed through a theoretical framework developed by the authors. This framework enabled to individualize the research streams and the perspectives through which CE strategies adopted by manufacturers have been studied in the extant scientific literature. These research streams are technologies, and evaluation methods and models. Besides, both of these two are studied under two different lenses since they both are mutually considered supportive tools to shift or to maintain a circular system. To conclude, one of the major contributions of this literature review is to provide a clearer definition of CM and to figure out how CM strategies have been addressed by academics in the scientific literature, with the final aim to reduce the confusion emerged in the extant literature around this concept. Last, this review elucidates some scientific literature gaps and suggests future research directions
Role of artificial intelligence in circular manufacturing: A systematic literature review
Full text linkCircular Economy (CE) empowers firms (micro-level), network of firms (meso-level), cities, regions and nations (macro-level) sustainability. CE potentialities in making regenerate resources are even greater if supported by technologies, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gaining momentum in this regard. The extant literature presents a limited investigation of the exploitable synergies among CE and AI at the different scales of CE adoption in manufacturing, also named Circular Manufacturing (CM). Indeed, this paper entails a systematic literature review to investigate the state-of-the-art in this domain proposing future research opportunities. Among the findings, AI exploitation is advanced at micro-level, whilst the meso-level, macro-level, and the synergies among the three levels require further exploration
Industry 4.0 Enabling Technologies Supporting the Social Sphere of Circular Manufacturing
Full text linkCircular Economy (CE) paradigm may contribute in enhancing the sustainability of the manufacturing sector, and in this context CE takes the name of Circular Manufacturing (CM). The extant literature highlighted the several benefits characterizing this paradigm, but most of the studies aimed at investigating especially those benefits enhancing the environmental and the economic performances of manufacturing companies. Instead, the social sphere has been usually neglected even though it represents one of the main aspects to be considered while moving towards sustainability and circularity. Indeed, CM can be embraced only though the engagement of consumers and the involvement of the whole company, which thus requires the active participation of both users and workers. The social benefits might be reinforced by the introduction of technologies, such as the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) ones, which might support both physically and cognitively the workers and the establishment of the relationships with consumers. Hence, the aim of this contribution is to investigate how I4.0 technologies enable the enhancement of the social benefits obtainable by manufacturing companies while adopting CM. This analysis has been performed through the review of the extant literature which has been conducted relying on both Scopus and Web of Science as scientific databases. 42 selected contributions have been analyzed to identify the specific I4.0 technologies required to enhance the social benefits obtainable from the adoption of CM. From a managerial perspective, this contribution enables to define the key technologies adoptable to enhance the social benefits obtainable from the adoption of CM and to clarify what these benefits are. From a scientific perspective, this contribution enables to cover the envisioned gap about the need to further explore the social benefits obtainable from CM adoption
A research on hard and soft skills required to operate in a manufacturing company embracing the industry 4.0 paradigm
No full textThe requests by customers are becoming more and more complex and for this reason, much more flexible and scalable production systems are needed. This takes place in a Smart Factory where Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are implemented. Together with the numerous opportunities, some challenges arise. In particular, the major problem seems to be correlated to skills shortage. In fact, companies should bear in mind that the human capital is an essential resource that must be kept aligned with the technological advancement in order to foster their competitiveness. It has been seen that the requests in terms of competences are changing rapidly, and therefore today traditional hard skills must be enhanced by new hard skills, and these must be complementary to soft skills. For this reason, it is interesting to investigate the skills required to operate in a factory embracing the Industry 4.0 paradigm. In order to do that, we carried out a deep research on the current status of the society in general, to then look at how jobs are modifying and which types of new job profiles are arising. Moreover, we carried out a skills classification analysis in order to put the basis for future research in terms of the creation of a new skills assessment model focused on Industry 4.0 context
Service Performance Assessment and Governance
Full text linkPerformance Indicators (PIs) are designed to help organizations and decision makers to better understand how well they are performing in relation to their strategic and tactical goals; nowadays, numerous methods and tools have been developed to facilitate the generation and selection of the most suitable PIs. Especially in the service sectors, service performance assessment methods should be used to develop a coherent and comprehensive set of service driven performance indicators. The basic idea behind a performance assessment method in the service system is to generate and select the performance indicators to be used by the members of the service delivery eco-system, which represent the actors for the delivery of services. In this respect, the purpose of this paper is to lay out a method for generating and selecting the performance indicators related to particular service system requirements. To accomplish this, the proposed method will be defined to optimize monitoring and controlling activities within a service system. In order to be able to produce meaningful results a case study is presented, where the method has been adopted by a company producing domestic appliances
Development of a holonic metamodel for lifecycle support and product extension
No full text\textcopyright 2005 IEEE. The paper summarizes the effort spent by the authors in developing a model to enable product traceability along the entire product lifecycle and fostering product extension. The research effort adopts a holonic definition of the product and, analysing the current most important standard in product representation, proposes a reference data model
- …
