Systematic integration of circular economy strategies in the life cycle of technical product-service systems (CircularPSS)

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Jan C. Aurich
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556952979

Manufacturing companies are striving to make their products and service provision more ecologically sustainable. Customer and political demands for resource efficiency, climate neutrality and sustainability are constantly increasing. These demands can be met with circular economy strategies, which replace the end-of-life of products with concepts such as remanufacturing or reuse. Product-service systems (PSS), characterized by the joint design of tangible products, intangible services, and supporting infrastructure, can potentially be used to implement circular strategies. The targeted circularity describes the ability of PSS to execute circular economy concepts. Increased circularity should also be accompanied by an increase in environmental sustainability. Especially technical PSS, which focus on capital goods, show great potentials in this context, such as long lifetime, close customer relationships or modular design. The project aims at making industrial products and service provision through technical PSS more sustainable and at the same time economically efficient. To this end, circular economy strategies are to be explicitly integrated into the life cycle of technical PSS. For this purpose, the PSS design is chosen as a starting point in order to use the design possibilities available there. Based on three application scenarios from the agricultural machinery and machine tool industry, it is examined, how circularity can be quantified already in the PSS design. Subsequently, the mechanisms and processes that significantly influence circularity are investigated. Based on this, a process model is developed that enables the targeted design of circular PSS. The results are validated using two additional scenarios.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants