Published on 6 November 2024
IMT Mines Albi drew on a use case on retrofitting thermal vehicles into electric vehicles to develop decision support tools to help companies design their supply chains. This work builds on the principles of the physical internet and aims to improve the circularity of supply chain networks.
IMT Mines Albi scientists are developing decision support tools to design optimized and more circular supply chain networks by drawing on the principles of the physical internet. Credits: Pexels.
The circular economy aims to reduce environmental impacts by optimizing the use of resources. It is based on three fundamental principles, known as the three Rs. First: Reduce the amount of resources we consume and the waste we generate. Second: Reuse by extending the lifespan of products or finding new uses for them. And finally: Recycle by transforming waste into new products. These three Rs form the hierarchy of waste management. Their specific order intentionally emphasizes the importance of preventing waste before it is managed and prioritizing the reuse and refurbishment of products over recycling.
Companies are increasingly aligning with this concept, of course, both to promote environmental and economic sustainability, and to meet new regulations. However, “when we look at the literature related to the circular economy in industrial contexts, we see that the research is essentially focused on recyclability, therefore on materials and chemistry. Little attention is paid to the logistical and organizational aspects involved in this theme,” says Ziqing Wu, a PhD student at IMT Mines Albi’s Industrial Engineering Centre (CGI). “Yet this represents a real challenge.”
The young researcher is working under the supervision of two CGI researchers, Matthieu Lauras (the center’s director) and Raphael Oger to design hyperconnected supply chain networks that improve circularity. Her work is co-supervised by two other researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), Benoit Montreuil, a pioneer in the physical internet, and Louis Faugère, who is also Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon.
It all began in 2021 when a start-up called Transition One contacted IMT Mines Albi teams for assistance in organizing its flows. The young company specializes in electric retrofit, which involves extending the lifespan of combustion engine vehicles by replacing the engine and tank with an electric motor and a battery. In addition to electrification, the start-up aims to recycle parts removed from end-of-life combustion engines whenever possible, and to ensure ongoing maintenance of converted vehicles.
“We did not have any specific knowledge of retrofit to begin with. Our role was simply to address the flow design,” says Raphael Oger, who specializes in designing decision support systems for production system planning. The team therefore immersed itself in Transition One’s logistics processes and the technical challenges the start-up was facing, that is until the company went out of business in 2023!
“We continued our work on this circularity issue, however, and stuck to the context of a retrofit supply chain,” the supervisor explains. The retrofit industry is in fact circular in nature since, as Ziqing Wu points out, “it transcends the principle of repairability and recycling by proposing to change a product’s features to improve it.”
The team’s initial goal is to be able to quantify the potential demand for retrofit by geographic area and vehicle type. “There is not currently any historical sales forecasting data for the vehicle retrofit industry. We therefore had to use the Vehicle Registration System (SIV) database to obtain the number of vehicles owned in France and their characteristics to estimate the geographical demand in terms of volume for this service which does not yet exist,” Raphaël Oger explains. Based on this information, the scientists can then help companies entering the retrofit market to design and set up a short and efficient supply chain.
In a supply chain network, the various structures and different flow mechanisms have ecological and financial impacts, both in terms of the various facilities to be completed and with regard to the overall ecosystem. The scientists are working to improve circularity by designing a decision support system that takes into account the location and number of facilities, as well as their interactions. “If a company wants to start retrofitting combustion vehicles, our goal is to provide a solution that will allow it to design and roll out a supply chain network that is consistent with the principles of the circular economy,” Ziqing Wu says.
These reflections on circular and sustainable design are also fueled by another research area on the physical internet. This multidisciplinary field of research aims to connect the stakeholders and logistics infrastructures that generally operate in isolation. Georgia Tech’s Physical Internet Center laboratory is devoted to this research area, which relies on the principles of the digital internet to structure and standardize the organization of this network. It offers a more efficient, interoperable and sustainable logistics model that reduces costs and the sector’s ecological footprint.
Take, for example, a delivery truck that is generally used by and for a single company and is rarely filled to capacity. In this case, the physical internet will connect various companies to pool their resources, fill the truck and improve logistical efficiency. Ziqing Wu is learning from the literature and drawing on the experience of her supervisors as she tests conceptual ideas, such as adopting economic models that prioritize access to goods rather than possession, or mobile and flexible factories to bring the point of production closer to the point of consumption. “We are using fairly generic ideas as we try to describe a system in which the circular supply chain network and the physical internet intersect. This helps us to develop scenarios in which the network is more or less geared toward the physical internet, and to then design our decision support systems,” the PhD student explains. “For each scenario, these systems then determine the number of facilities, their location and their size.”
The team uses optimization techniques to design these systems, which are actually mathematical models. Their goal is to find the optimal solution by changing a certain number of decision-making variables. “The aim is not to model what happens operationally in the factory,” Roger Oger says, “but rather macroscopically, with the different parts of the chain, the ‘nodes’ – e.g. factories, recycling centers, retrofit centers, warehouses, etc. – and flows, such as truck trips.”
In addition to the design and simulation aspects, Ziqing Wu is also working on the performance assessment for these systems. The results are of course dependent on the cases studied. The PhD student and her team therefore compare the performances of various configurations for a given case, with given characteristics. “ Our initial application case was on retrofitting thermal vehicles to electric, but the idea is for our work to be generalized and applied to all business sectors,” Raphael Oger says. Although they are still a long way off from a turnkey solution for industrial stakeholders, governmental or non-governmental organizations, Ziqing Wu’s research, which is nearing its end, has paved the way for significant progress in the area and provided enough material for developing a software prototype.
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