Designing Circular Supply Chains: A Requirements-Driven and CE-Centred System Design Methodology

The Circular Economy (CE) model aims to eliminate waste by coordinating collaborative stakeholder efforts throughout the life cycle to keep resources in circulation at the highest level and regenerate ecological systems. The shift towards circular resource flows contrasts to the linear consumption model, which has resulted in the depletion of resources and accumulation of waste (Lahane et al. 2020). Circular resource flows are increasingly being deployed through interventions such as shifting to renewable or secondary raw materials and adding reverse logistic operationsto traditional supply chains (Mallick et al. 2024). These interventions create a circular supply chain (CSC) as they enhance resource efficiency and yield value for stakeholders through reduced material losses and energy conservation (Zeeuw van der Laan and Aurisicchio 2021). However, currently supply chain interventions are often introduced without a holistic plan to create circular value and departing from existing resource and system configurations that are challenging to change (Bressanelli et al. 2019; Burke et al. 2023). In addition, circular resource flows are often designed by few stakeholders, despite being increasingly acknowledged that collaboration and cooperation between all stakeholders are necessary and critical to achieve a CSC (Bressanelli et al. 2019; Gomes et al. 2024). Existing tools to facilitate the design of CSCs are inadequate as they do not support holistic design, following the three dimensions of sustainability (MahmoumGonbadi et al. 2021; Shahsavani and Goli 2023; Sassanelli et al. 2019). A gap exists in the literature with respect to tools to design CSCs from system requirements and provide tangible information on resource flows for easy system definition and performance measurement (Sassanelli et al. 2019; MahmoumGonbadi et al. 2021). Among others, tools are needed that can support CSC design in the early stages of the development process when alternative system configurations are likely to emerge and stakeholders must promptly define, test, verify and validate them (Burke et al. 2023; NASA 2017). The aim of this paper is to propose a system design methodology for the concurrent design of a CSC and its resources, whilst allowing for stakeholder collaboration. The final methodology involves a comprehensive representation of resource flows to facilitate system design and assessment, establish performance of alternative system configurations and inform decision-making. Further, when the system performance is determined, the methodology has to enable verification of the system requirements and validation to check if stakeholders intent is met, providing a robust and practical approach to system design and resource management in alignment with CE principles.