Co-simulation is a promising approach for the modelling and simulation of complex systems, that makes use of mature simulation tools in the respective domains. It has been applied in wildly different domains, oftentimes without a comprehensive study of the impact to the simulation results. As a consequence, over the recent years, researchers have set out to understand the essential challenges arising from the application of this technique. This paper complements the existing surveys in that the social and empirical aspects were addressed. More than 50 experts participated in a two-stage Delphi study to determine current challenges, research needs and promising standards and tools. Furthermore, an analysis of the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats of co-simulation utilizing the analytic hierarchy process resulting in a SWOT-AHP analysis is presented. The empirical results of this study show that experts consider the FMI standard to be the most promising standard for continuous time, discrete event and hybrid co-simulation. The results of the SWOT-AHP analysis indicate that factors related to strengths and opportunities predominate. References

A trend across most areas where simulation-driven development is used is the ever increasing size and complexity of the systems under consideration, pushing established methods of modeling and simulation towards their limits. This paper complements existing surveys on large-scale modeling and simulation of physical systems by conducting expert surveys. We conducted a two-stage empirical survey in order to investigate research needs, current challenges as well as promising modeling and simulation paradigms. Furthermore, we applied the analytic hierarchy process method to prioritise the strengths and weakness of different modeling paradigms. The results of this study show that experts consider acausal modeling techniques to be suitable for modeling large scale systems, while causal techniques are considered less suitable.

Over the last years, academic literature has made significant progress on the development of key concepts, identifying circular product typologies, developing assessment methods, and exploring the synergies with manufacturing trends such as digitalisation or environmental management. Nevertheless, less attention has been paid on describing process model changes necessary for the implementation of circular product development. For this reason, this paper presents the circular Sustainable Product Development (cSPD) morphological field, aimed at providing implementation guidance to business and industry. It describes possible reconfigurations of the Sustainable Product Development (SPD) process model to further integrate circularity R-strategies, design scopes, design guidelines, inter- and intra-organisational actors and criteria for evaluation. With this framework, we intend to identify the most defining parameters in the process model and assign them a discrete number of categorical values so that different combinations explain the generation of prevalent circular product typologies in the manufacturing of durable goods.

This article describes the first results of an empirical survey on co-simulation conducted with over 50 experts in this field. In the last decades, cosimulation has become an important tool to meet challenges emerging from the increasing complexity of systems and the need for efficient collaboration between experts in different disciplines. However, research on this topic has been motivated by varying fields of interest and developed with different perspectives on application and thus lead to different definitions and emphases within this topic. The present survey aims to clarify some of these different perceptions and open research fields.

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