Simulating the Formation of Urban Mines Considering the Rational Decisions of Distributed End-of-Life Stakeholders

Abstract

Stakeholders engaged in the separation and refinement of laptop computers at the end-of-life are indispensable for the recycling of components such as batteries and printed circuit boards. Since the stakeholders are located in various geographical locations, whether they perform the operations or not influences how the urban mines of laptop computers are formed in terms of quantity and location. In this paper, a method for simulating the formation of the urban mines based on the rational decisions of end-of-life stakeholders is proposed. The system can simulate the formation considering the geographical distribution of the stakeholders as well as variations in the material composition of laptop computers across generations. This paper describes the architecture of the system and its data-preparation, simulation, and visualization processes, which are validated with a simulation model prepared with statistical information concerning used laptop computers. The system can simulate the formation of urban mines of various kinds of products if similar types of information presented in the laptop computer example data are prepared or hypothesized accordingly.