The vision of the circular factory for the perpetual innovative product

Abstract The growing scarcity of global resources demands a transition from linear to circular production patterns. This article presents a novel vision for integrating linear and circular production processes within a flexible and autonomous production system to achieve perpetual product use. The approach aims to preserve the added value of products and to integrate the design of product generations and production systems. Within the circular factory, the following core aspects must be examined: predicting functions of products, managing uncertainty in used products and process sequences, learning human action for complex tasks, implementing changeable, autonomous production systems, and enabling knowledge modeling for the circular factory across domains. Aspired results are a design for circular factory, effective strategies for uncertainty management and autonomous systems adaptation as well as the externalization of operational knowledge. This research is part of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1574, which explores these aspects in detail. For an in-depth understanding of specific components, it is referred to other publications by the CRC 1574.