Towards Circular Production Systems: Outlining the Concept, Challenges and Future Research Directions

Manufacturing companies must significantly reduce their negative environmental impact, while simultaneously needing to be capable of managing changing customer requirements and increasingly fluctuating volume demands. These constraints require discontinuing developing production systems in line with the outdated and unsustainable linear economy, wherein the system is design and developed for short term production only. In this paper, it is motivated how a production system is distinguished from a product and why state-of-the-art circular economy theory must be adapted to production systems in order to deal with these issues. Furthermore, based on theory and inputs from workshops with participants from the industry, a conceptual framework for circular production system is proposed. In the proposed circular production systems, the principles of circular economy is adapted in order to maximize resource utilization and prolong the lifetime of the production system. Challenges towards the circular production systems have been identified through workshops and potential solutions described. Lastly, future research directions for further developing the circular production system is presented.