sustainability

Over the past decades, circular economy has established itself as an important strategy for tackling sustainability challenges. Its holistic approach aims to use resources efficiently and minimize waste. This article aims to identify and evaluate the numerous challenges connected to the successful implementation and expansion of the circular economy approach. Economic, technological, social and political aspects are examined to provide a comprehensive insight into the complexity of the strategy and its implementation. The article concludes that a successful circular economy can only be achieved through the coordinated cooperation of different stakeholders and the development of innovative solutions to the identified challenges.

In remanufacturing, used goods are brought up to the quality level of a new product. This distinguishes it from recycling, which recovers materials and converts them into new units or products. Various uncertainties, such as the condition, quantity and time of return, can be minimized with Industry 4.0 approaches and artificial intelligence. A special learning concept ensures that employees have the required competence profiles in this context.

The typical problems of a medium-sized company, coupled with the new requirements for sustainability, harbor the potential for economic tension. Learning factories can counteract this: they simulate production processes and offer an environment where participants can develop knowledge and skills in a realistic production setting. Establishing an innovation factory not only increases productivity, but also significantly reduces land consumption.

The decentralized data ecosystem Gaia-X, which is currently under development, supports the future viability of the digital data economy in Europe. But how can relevant use cases be realized in Gaia-X from a service-oriented perspective? To answer this question, this article presents a methodology that describes a structured and interdisciplinary approach to service development in the ongoing Gaia-X 4 ROMS consortium research project [1]. In this project, federated services are realized in five processing steps on the basis of use cases. IT experts, software developers and industry users can leverage the model to efficiently coordinate the joint realization of use cases with Gaia-X and the goal of sovereign data exchange.

Small batch sizes are a necessity in the textile industry due to the increasing diversification of products and end applications as well as short-term orders in networked value chains. At the same time, this involves a high level of configuration, planning, preparation and im-plementation. The costs increase disproportionately and are usually not directly quantifia-ble. In addition, sustainability considerations are now increasingly required. This article de-scribes an SME-suitable, simulation-based methodology for analyzing and configuring tex-tile manufacturing systems with regard to ecological and economic sustainability for small batch sizes in textile manufacturing and illustrates this using textile manufacturing in the weaving industry as an example.

More than 99% of German companies are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which therefore represent an important part of industrial supply chains. New regulations are increasing the pressure on companies to create transparency along the supply chain so that the role of SMEs is also coming into focus. However, they are often confronted with limited financial and human resources. Based on a quantitative survey and a literature review, this article deals with the question of what SME-friendly approaches could look like.