The manufacturing industry is required to achieve Circular economy (CE) to generate economic benefits while minimizing resource consumption. Key challenges include difficulties in managing the entire product lifecycle due to insufficient information sharing between stakeholders. Thus, designing an appropriate circular ecosystem is key to transforming the conventional business towards a CE. However, methodologies for designing circular ecosystems have not yet been established in prior research. The objective of this study is to develop a design support methodology for circular ecosystems using scenario analysis. For this purpose, we proposed a method for modeling a circular ecosystem using three layers: that is, value, business, and lifecycle layers and to evaluate described scenarios based on the circular ecosystem model. Additionally, we extracted circular ecosystem patterns to support the creation of circular ecosystem scenarios. We conducted a case study of the industrial automation sector in Japan to demonstrate the proposed method. Results showed that we generated 32 ideas for circular systems by using circular ecosystem patterns. For example, the transformation scenario was created that a circular platform provider monitors data in use and proposes optimal maintenance. The proposed method was effective in the following two respects: (1) using the three-layered model and the circular ecosystem patterns contributed to creating some scenarios for transforming circular ecosystems and describing the scenarios structurally, and (2) adopting the scenario development methodology supported assessing the scenarios by the process of designing circular ecosystem.
Sato et al. (Wed,) studied this question.