Design of Production Structures for Circular Production

Increasing resource consumption due to economic growth leads to resource scarcity, raising resource costs and accelerating climate change. Circular production presents a solution by enabling companies to decouple economic growth and resource consumption. However, circular production strategies such as Re-Manufacturing and Re-assembly are not widely adopted due to deficient economic profitability. To ensure profitability, companies must maintain a flexible yet efficient production to accommodate variability of end-of-life product returns. This challenge can be addressed with a suitable production structure for circular production. Current approaches for production structure design focus either on efficiency or flexibility and are neglecting a holistic perspective. Moreover, they do not sufficiently consider the influence of circular production on production. This paper describes a methodology for the design of production structures in circular production using cellular structures while considering both flexibility and efficiency. Cellular structures enable the trade-off between flexibility and efficiency of individual production cells, ensuring a high overall level of efficiency. The methodology for designing production structures in circular production is described using three overarching steps. The three steps include describing and modeling the influences of circular production on production characteristics, designing production structures considering these influences and lastly, evaluating the economic efficiency of production structures.