Circular economy: A coloured petri net based discrete event simulation model

Transition from linear economy to circular economy has been so fast due to worsening circumstances stem from climate change and pollution environmental effect. The circular economy has provoked by the emergent need to cope with resources scarcity (e.g. water and food). This economy generates a new way of rethinking and re-design process by re-using the same material, minimise the impact of waste and pollution, and revamp the economy. In this context, cities offer a desirable place for the evolution of the circular economy thanks to their closeness to citizens, companies, and service suppliers. Such cycles, are very interesting systems from a performance evaluation point of view: in this paper we offer an holistic case study by employing Coloured Petri Nets to describe a real case scenario of circular economy. We focus on a very current example which considers the circular production of chitin by bioconversion of municipal waste and we show how we can describe and analyse it by using standard approaches to performance evaluation. The results allow to focus on interesting metrics and performance indicators, which may not be easily obtainable with conventional techniques used in the economic domain.