Mapping the Utilisation of I4.0 and I5.0 Technologies Along the Product Life Cycle to Enable Circular Economy Endeavours
摘要
With the pressing goals of sustainability and continuous technological advancement, enterprises need to change their strategy regarding their production processes. Furthermore, even the industrial fabric is influenced by this technological disruption, and new paradigms have been introduced. Amongst these new concepts, it is important to point out the new paradigm of Industry 5.0, introduced in 2018, which defines the working environment as characterized by a high integration between humans and technologies. Another important concept to consider is the ideation of the Circular Economy model, introduced by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is a system where materials and products are maintained in a closed-loop process through the 10R strategies. This study aims to understand how companies are exploiting technologies towards the achievement of circular economy strategies. In order to retrieve this information, the authors conducted a literature review, considering only application cases and case studies. For this study, Scopus has been used as a search engine to collect all the useful articles. The authors collected all the relevant data regarding the region of the application, the technologies employed, which circular economy strategies have been used for the specific production process, which part of the product life cycle firms are frequently focused on and what companies need to ameliorate to improve their processes. A synthesis of the findings will be shown and some suggestions to foster and promote circular economy strategies within the production environment will be provided.