Alessandro Bertoni

The paper presents a simulation framework for evaluating fast charging and battery swapping strategies in battery-electric construction machinery. Developed using discrete-event and agent-based modeling, the framework supports scenario analysis in mining and road construction contexts. Case studies demonstrate how charging strategies impact productivity, energy costs, and battery degradation. Results highlight trade-offs between operational efficiency and long-term sustainability, offering a decision-support tool for electromobility transition in construction machinery.

Recent academic contributions explore the integration of Digital Twins (DTs) within smart Product-Service System (sPSS). This integration aims to innovate business propositions, hardware and services. However, gaps persist in developing DT environments to support early-stage collaborative innovation for sPSS, and limited studies explore how real-time synchronized digital replicas enhance value co-creation in this area. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a framework and practical example of integrating value-driven decision support into early sPSS conceptual design. A case study on the development of the Smart Electric Vehicle (SEV) conducted with a global automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) demonstrates the framework’s efficacy. Through qualitative data analyses based on experimental validation in a case company, the DT proves effective in aiding decision makers in selecting value-adding configurations within specific scenarios. Furthermore, the DT serves as a visual decision-making tool, fostering collaboration across diverse teams within the automotive company. This collaboration facilitates value creation across practitioners with varied backgrounds, emphasizing the DT’s role in enhancing early-stage innovation and co-creation processes in the sPSS domain.

Increasing sustainability expectations requires support for the design of systems that are reactive in minimizing potential negative impact and proactive in guiding engineering decision-making toward more value-robust long-term decisions. This article identifies a gap in the methodological support for the design of circular systems, building on the hypothesis that computer-based simulation models will drive the development of more value-robust systems designed to behave positively in a changeable operational environment during the whole lifecycle. The article presents a framework for value-robust circular systems design, complementing the current approaches for circular design aimed at increasing decision-makers’ awareness about the complexity of circular systems to be designed. The framework is theoretically described and demonstrated through its applications in four case studies in the field of construction machinery investigating new circular solutions for the future of mining, quarrying and road construction. The framework supports the development of more resilient and sustainable systems, strengthening the feedback loop between exploring new technologies, proposing innovative concepts and evaluating system performance.

The ongoing servitization journey of the manufacturing industries instills a through-life perspective of value, where a combination of products and services is delivered to meet expectations. Often described as a product-service system (PSS), these systems are poised with many complexity aspects, introducing uncertainties during the design phase. Incorporating changeability is one of the known strategies to deal with such uncertainties, where the system changes in the face of uncertainty to sustain value, thereby achieving value robustness. While the theme of dealing with multiple uncertainties has been discussed since the inception of PSS, changeability is still poorly addressed. To bridge this gap, an integrative literature review is performed to outline various complexities aspects and their link to uncertainty from a PSS perspective. Also, the state-of-the-art approach to achieving value robustness is presented via changeability incorporation. Subsequently, a reference framework is proposed to guide decision-makers in changeability incorporation in PSS, especially during the early design stages.

The paper presents an approach where the iterative replication of Discrete Event Simulations on future operational scenarios is used to derive data-driven design merit functions. The presented contribution proposes an extension of the EVOKE (Early Value Oriented Design Exploration with Knowledge Maturity) approach determining when and how the experience-based judgment about maximization, minimization, optimization, and avoidance functions, correlating value drivers and quantified objectives, can be substituted by data-driven mathematical functions obtained by scenarios simulations. The approach is described through a simplified case concerning the development of autonomous electric vehicles to complement the public transport system in the city of Karlskrona in Sweden. The consideration of value drivers and quantified objectives presented is meant to support a preliminary screening of potential design configurations to support the definition of high-level product and system-related functional requirements, to be run before a more detailed conceptual design analysis.