Approaches to Digital Supply-Demand-Matching

Kurzfassung

An important building block of a circular economy is the recycling of waste and end-of-life products. Here, the goal is to reintroduce resources back into production processes, thus (partly) replacing the need for extracting and refining them from natural sources. There is a plethora of materials ranging from almost pure to various alloys. Similarly on the side of recycling, many different approaches have been developed to recycle waste and reclaim contained materials. One major challenge is to determine optimal recycling processes given a certain type of waste. Optimality may be defined along different criteria including but not limited to economic viability, recovery rate of materials contained, and the energy balance of the recycling process itself. With the accumulated waste changing constantly and recycling processes evolving as well, there can not be a static matching between the two but only constant adaptation will yield the currently optimal result.