A decision support model for efficient garment reprocessing for a sustainable circular business model

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Patel, Hariketan and Vasantha, Gokula and Corney, Jonathan and Quigley, John and El Raoui, Hanane and Sales, Rachel and Cusak, Micheal and Burns, Anthony and Rough, Andrew (2025) A decision support model for efficient garment reprocessing for a sustainable circular business model. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology. ISSN 1433-3015 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-025-17164-5)

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Abstract

The rapidly growing fashion business has intensified environmental, and sustainability concerns due to its focus on high-volume production at low costs. The rental-based business models in the circular economy, by promoting alternative approach of garment ownership, aim to mitigate environmental impact, enhance businesses competitiveness, and provide user value to customers. The rapid reprocessing of garment rentals offered to customers, boosts corporate earnings and mitigates environmental issues. However, considering the complexities of garment reprocessing and fluctuations in rental demand, the objective of this study is to use an Open Jackson queue network with a decomposition approach to analyse the effects of external arrival rates and worker's processing rates on lead processing time and throughput for different garment types. The tradeoff curves provide sensitivity analysis by varying the external arrival rate and the worker's processing rate to examine their impact on lead time and throughput of garment types. The results based on the workcell utilization demonstrates the tradeoff in throughput of various garment types by varying process parameters in the garments reprocessing. The results indicate that deviations in process parameters beyond certain upper and lower thresholds result in reduced throughput and increase in lead time for garment types. The rearrangement of workers in reprocessing workcell network shown a favourable improvement in the throughput of garment types. The findings significantly benefit the garment sector by offering a methodical approach for efficient processing, consequently improving overall efficiency and sustainability, and promoting circular economy efforts.

ORCID iDs

Patel, Hariketan, Vasantha, Gokula, Corney, Jonathan, Quigley, John ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7253-8470, El Raoui, Hanane ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9079-3248, Sales, Rachel ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6204-1878, Cusak, Micheal, Burns, Anthony and Rough, Andrew;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)