Yann Leroy | Ecole CentraleSupelec (original) (raw)
Papers by Yann Leroy
Proceedings of the Design Society
A refrigerant system (like that of a supermarket) is a complex system if we consider all the stak... more A refrigerant system (like that of a supermarket) is a complex system if we consider all the stakeholders throughout its lifecycle phases (use, maintenance, technological update, end of life). The lack of stakeholders' interaction during the design and other lifecycle stages of such a system generates issues and leads to sub-optimal system performances. We used the RID methodology to identify the main areas for improvement for these activities related to the refrigerant system. It is precisely designed to analyze, within the scope of activity, the major stakeholders' problems (user profiles) during lifecycle phases (use situations) to deduce areas for improvement (value buckets). Therefore, we built a process of interviews and data collection on existing practices to feed into a RID model. The first results are an archetypal description of the actors and problems encountered according to the lifecycle phases. The second part is a prioritized mapping of the areas to improve d...
Proceedings of the Design Society
Considering a growing number of metrics and indicators to assess circular economy, it is of param... more Considering a growing number of metrics and indicators to assess circular economy, it is of paramount importance to shed light on how they differ from traditional approaches, such as life cycle assessment (LCA) or sustainability performance indicators. This study provides new empirical insights on the correlation between LCA, circularity, and sustainability indicator-based approaches. Specifically, the importance lies in analyzing how the results generated by these different approaches can be used to support the design of products that are not only circular, but also sustainable. A practice-based project involving 87 engineering students (divided into 20 groups) is conducted with the aim to compare and improve the circularity and sustainability performance of three product alternatives of lawn mowers (gasoline, electric, autonomous). To do so, the following resources are deployed: 18 midpoints environmental indicators calculated by LCA, eight product circularity indicators, and nume...
Proceedings of the Design Society
The formalization of environmental issues has gained prominence since the definition of sustainab... more The formalization of environmental issues has gained prominence since the definition of sustainable development by the Brundtland's report. Environmental performance has then been introduced to qualify the “green” contribution of an organization to its surrounding environment. However, its multi-dimensional aspects can be problematic when designing projects and making decisions, especially in the infrastructure sector where industrial activities are the most polluting ones. The aim of the study is to fill the environmental gap and confusion for decision-makers on the understanding of environmental performance, as well as to communicate on it, to define and share a clear vision and targets. A literature review is conducted and confronted with an industrial example in the railway sector to analyze the existing misunderstandings in industries while approaching environmental issues. By proposing and setting a clear framework of environmental performance, this research contributes to...
International Journal of Sustainable Engineering
Volume 4: 24th Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle Conference; 13th International Conference on Micro- and Nanosystems
The purpose of this paper is to develop and discuss a framework aiming at monitoring and optimizi... more The purpose of this paper is to develop and discuss a framework aiming at monitoring and optimizing the circularity performance of products for ensuring and facilitating green profit design trade-offs whilst meeting or anticipating end-of-life regulations during the design and development process of industrial products. The proposed framework is used to extend the Green Profit Model — an optimization model to maximize the total profit from the sales of new and remanufactured products, while achieving environmental impact savings — by adding a third dimension to this model, which is the circularity performance. As such, in addition to remanufacturing, it covers a wider spectrum of circular economy practices, leading to additional economic opportunities and environmental trade-offs between maintenance, reuse, remanufacturing and recycling at a product, parts and material levels. A first formulation of this extended optimization model is given and discussed through an illustrative exam...
Management et ingénierie de l'innovation
Journal of Autonomous Vehicles and Systems
Autonomous Vehicles (AV) are designed to operate in a specific Operational Context (OC), and the ... more Autonomous Vehicles (AV) are designed to operate in a specific Operational Context (OC), and the adaptability of the vehicle's architecture to its OC is considered a significant success criterion of the design. AV design projects are rarely started from scratch and are often based on reference architectures. As such, the reference architecture must be modified and adapted to the OC. The current literature on engineering change propagation does not provide a method to identify and anticipate the impact of OC changes on the AV reference architecture. This paper proposes a two-step method for OC change propagation: (1) Analyzing the direct impact of OC change and (2) evaluate the probabilities of indirect change propagation. The direct impact is assessed following a propagation path based upon a model mapping between an OC Ontology, operational situations, and Functional Chains. The effects of Functional Chain changes on the AV components are analyzed and evaluated by domain expert...
Sustainable Production and Consumption
Design Science
Ecodesign has gained significant traction in recent years ranging from academic research to busin... more Ecodesign has gained significant traction in recent years ranging from academic research to business applications at a global scale. Initial emphasis on the environmental aspect of design has evolved to include economic and social aspects, with projects ranging from small-scale products to large-scale industrial systems. In this paper, the authors re-analyse 10 of their major ecodesign research projects of the past ten years to identify five categories of challenges and promising future directions for ecodesign research. This paper is primarily a retrospective position paper based on the authors’ experience of actual design studies, providing also a relevant literature review and summary of design practices.
Resources, Conservation and Recycling
Expert Systems with Applications
This research set out to identify and structure from online reviews the words and expressions rel... more This research set out to identify and structure from online reviews the words and expressions related to customers' likes and dislikes to guide product development. Previous methods were mainly focused on product features. However, reviewers express their preference not only on product features. In this paper, based on an extensive literature review in design science, the authors propose a summarization model containing multiples aspects of user preference, such as product affordances, emotions, usage conditions. Meanwhile, the linguistic patterns describing these aspects of preference are discovered and drafted as annotation guidelines. A case study demonstrates that with the proposed model and the annotation guidelines, human annotators can structure the online reviews with high inter-agreement. As high inter-agreement human annotation results are essential for automatizing the online review summarization process with the natural language processing, this study provides materials for the future study of automatization.
Computers in Industry
The residential building is a major energy consumer and pollution source worldwide. The shift tow... more The residential building is a major energy consumer and pollution source worldwide. The shift towards constructing energy-efficient buildings is impelling higher performance. In sustainable building, occupants become a major source of uncertainty in energy consumption. Yet, energy simulation tools often account for occupant behaviour through predefined fixed consumption profiles. Therefore, energy and buildings experts are in need for more precise methods for better forecasting the influence of occupants on the building performance. An activity-based framework for quantifying occupant-related energy consumption is proposed. The energy consumption is quantified per domestic activity as a function of households' socio-demographic and economic attributes. The aggregation of such domestic activity energy consumption provides an accurate estimation of the household energy consumption per daily, monthly and annually periods. First, a literature review about residential energy consumption and the existing modelling approaches is presented. Second, a systematic breakdown structure of energy end-uses is proposed. The activity-based framework is then introduced. An application example is demonstrated together with simulation results. Finally, model's utility is outlined and its possible implications are discussed.
Resources, Conservation and Recycling
Recycling
Assessing product circularity performance is not straightforward. Meanwhile, it gains increasingl... more Assessing product circularity performance is not straightforward. Meanwhile, it gains increasingly importance for businesses and industrial practitioners who are willing to effectively take benefits from circular economy promises. Thus, providing methods and tools to evaluate then enhance product performance-in the light of circular economy-becomes a significant but still barely addressed topic. Following a joint agreement on the need to measure product circularity performance, this paper provides an overview of mechanisms aiming to help industrial practitioners in this task. In fact, three existing approaches to measure product circularity performance have been tested on an industrial case study and criticized regarding both their applicability in industry and their accordance with circular economy principles. Although these methods and tools deliver a first and rapid trend of product circularity performance, the whole complexity of circular economy paradigm is far from being considered. In addition, operational guidance for engineers, designers or managers to improve their products in a circular economy context are missing. As a result, both recommendations for industrial practitioners and guidelines for the design and development of new frameworks, tools and indicators aiming at measuring product circularity performance are provided. This includes cornerstones, key requirements and practical implications to support enhanced circularity measurement that will be developed in further work, accordingly to circular economy paradigm and industrial reality.
Lcm 2013, 2013
Functional Unit (FU) ensures the consideration of comparable product quantities to provide reliab... more Functional Unit (FU) ensures the consideration of comparable product quantities to provide reliable Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results. Although the definition of this FU is essential, it receives only a few attention in the normative texts. A high part of subjectivity is let to the LCA practitioner. In this paper variability sources of the FU definition are identified to propose a more structured and adapted approach. Literature references and data collected among 8 LCA experts on 5 case studies allow us to draw first recommendations towards a more structured FU definition framework.
We focus in this paper on the contribution of a subsystem to the environmental impact of a system... more We focus in this paper on the contribution of a subsystem to the environmental impact of a system. In this way we propose to explore some limits related to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), in particular the consideration of the use phase specificities (for example lifetime, technology or energy mix). Two cases studies concerning AREVA T&D's aluminium electrolysis conversion substations are proposed to illustrate these problems. The first one considers the environmental contribution of a transformer to the electrical substation, whereas the second one studies the contribution of the substation to primary aluminium production. We show that the context specificities of a product should be taken into account in order to assess its real environmental impacts. To ignore them can lead to false conclusions, what is essential to avoid when a company wants to define its eco-design strategy.
ABSTRACT Cet article est la suite de " La conception durable (Partie I) : enjeux et outi... more ABSTRACT Cet article est la suite de " La conception durable (Partie I) : enjeux et outils " paru dans le dernier numéro de Centraliens. Trois applications concrètes de recherches appliquées menées en conception durable au sein du Laboratoire Génie Industriel de Centrale y sont détaillées.
Proceedings of the Design Society
A refrigerant system (like that of a supermarket) is a complex system if we consider all the stak... more A refrigerant system (like that of a supermarket) is a complex system if we consider all the stakeholders throughout its lifecycle phases (use, maintenance, technological update, end of life). The lack of stakeholders' interaction during the design and other lifecycle stages of such a system generates issues and leads to sub-optimal system performances. We used the RID methodology to identify the main areas for improvement for these activities related to the refrigerant system. It is precisely designed to analyze, within the scope of activity, the major stakeholders' problems (user profiles) during lifecycle phases (use situations) to deduce areas for improvement (value buckets). Therefore, we built a process of interviews and data collection on existing practices to feed into a RID model. The first results are an archetypal description of the actors and problems encountered according to the lifecycle phases. The second part is a prioritized mapping of the areas to improve d...
Proceedings of the Design Society
Considering a growing number of metrics and indicators to assess circular economy, it is of param... more Considering a growing number of metrics and indicators to assess circular economy, it is of paramount importance to shed light on how they differ from traditional approaches, such as life cycle assessment (LCA) or sustainability performance indicators. This study provides new empirical insights on the correlation between LCA, circularity, and sustainability indicator-based approaches. Specifically, the importance lies in analyzing how the results generated by these different approaches can be used to support the design of products that are not only circular, but also sustainable. A practice-based project involving 87 engineering students (divided into 20 groups) is conducted with the aim to compare and improve the circularity and sustainability performance of three product alternatives of lawn mowers (gasoline, electric, autonomous). To do so, the following resources are deployed: 18 midpoints environmental indicators calculated by LCA, eight product circularity indicators, and nume...
Proceedings of the Design Society
The formalization of environmental issues has gained prominence since the definition of sustainab... more The formalization of environmental issues has gained prominence since the definition of sustainable development by the Brundtland's report. Environmental performance has then been introduced to qualify the “green” contribution of an organization to its surrounding environment. However, its multi-dimensional aspects can be problematic when designing projects and making decisions, especially in the infrastructure sector where industrial activities are the most polluting ones. The aim of the study is to fill the environmental gap and confusion for decision-makers on the understanding of environmental performance, as well as to communicate on it, to define and share a clear vision and targets. A literature review is conducted and confronted with an industrial example in the railway sector to analyze the existing misunderstandings in industries while approaching environmental issues. By proposing and setting a clear framework of environmental performance, this research contributes to...
International Journal of Sustainable Engineering
Volume 4: 24th Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle Conference; 13th International Conference on Micro- and Nanosystems
The purpose of this paper is to develop and discuss a framework aiming at monitoring and optimizi... more The purpose of this paper is to develop and discuss a framework aiming at monitoring and optimizing the circularity performance of products for ensuring and facilitating green profit design trade-offs whilst meeting or anticipating end-of-life regulations during the design and development process of industrial products. The proposed framework is used to extend the Green Profit Model — an optimization model to maximize the total profit from the sales of new and remanufactured products, while achieving environmental impact savings — by adding a third dimension to this model, which is the circularity performance. As such, in addition to remanufacturing, it covers a wider spectrum of circular economy practices, leading to additional economic opportunities and environmental trade-offs between maintenance, reuse, remanufacturing and recycling at a product, parts and material levels. A first formulation of this extended optimization model is given and discussed through an illustrative exam...
Management et ingénierie de l'innovation
Journal of Autonomous Vehicles and Systems
Autonomous Vehicles (AV) are designed to operate in a specific Operational Context (OC), and the ... more Autonomous Vehicles (AV) are designed to operate in a specific Operational Context (OC), and the adaptability of the vehicle's architecture to its OC is considered a significant success criterion of the design. AV design projects are rarely started from scratch and are often based on reference architectures. As such, the reference architecture must be modified and adapted to the OC. The current literature on engineering change propagation does not provide a method to identify and anticipate the impact of OC changes on the AV reference architecture. This paper proposes a two-step method for OC change propagation: (1) Analyzing the direct impact of OC change and (2) evaluate the probabilities of indirect change propagation. The direct impact is assessed following a propagation path based upon a model mapping between an OC Ontology, operational situations, and Functional Chains. The effects of Functional Chain changes on the AV components are analyzed and evaluated by domain expert...
Sustainable Production and Consumption
Design Science
Ecodesign has gained significant traction in recent years ranging from academic research to busin... more Ecodesign has gained significant traction in recent years ranging from academic research to business applications at a global scale. Initial emphasis on the environmental aspect of design has evolved to include economic and social aspects, with projects ranging from small-scale products to large-scale industrial systems. In this paper, the authors re-analyse 10 of their major ecodesign research projects of the past ten years to identify five categories of challenges and promising future directions for ecodesign research. This paper is primarily a retrospective position paper based on the authors’ experience of actual design studies, providing also a relevant literature review and summary of design practices.
Resources, Conservation and Recycling
Expert Systems with Applications
This research set out to identify and structure from online reviews the words and expressions rel... more This research set out to identify and structure from online reviews the words and expressions related to customers' likes and dislikes to guide product development. Previous methods were mainly focused on product features. However, reviewers express their preference not only on product features. In this paper, based on an extensive literature review in design science, the authors propose a summarization model containing multiples aspects of user preference, such as product affordances, emotions, usage conditions. Meanwhile, the linguistic patterns describing these aspects of preference are discovered and drafted as annotation guidelines. A case study demonstrates that with the proposed model and the annotation guidelines, human annotators can structure the online reviews with high inter-agreement. As high inter-agreement human annotation results are essential for automatizing the online review summarization process with the natural language processing, this study provides materials for the future study of automatization.
Computers in Industry
The residential building is a major energy consumer and pollution source worldwide. The shift tow... more The residential building is a major energy consumer and pollution source worldwide. The shift towards constructing energy-efficient buildings is impelling higher performance. In sustainable building, occupants become a major source of uncertainty in energy consumption. Yet, energy simulation tools often account for occupant behaviour through predefined fixed consumption profiles. Therefore, energy and buildings experts are in need for more precise methods for better forecasting the influence of occupants on the building performance. An activity-based framework for quantifying occupant-related energy consumption is proposed. The energy consumption is quantified per domestic activity as a function of households' socio-demographic and economic attributes. The aggregation of such domestic activity energy consumption provides an accurate estimation of the household energy consumption per daily, monthly and annually periods. First, a literature review about residential energy consumption and the existing modelling approaches is presented. Second, a systematic breakdown structure of energy end-uses is proposed. The activity-based framework is then introduced. An application example is demonstrated together with simulation results. Finally, model's utility is outlined and its possible implications are discussed.
Resources, Conservation and Recycling
Recycling
Assessing product circularity performance is not straightforward. Meanwhile, it gains increasingl... more Assessing product circularity performance is not straightforward. Meanwhile, it gains increasingly importance for businesses and industrial practitioners who are willing to effectively take benefits from circular economy promises. Thus, providing methods and tools to evaluate then enhance product performance-in the light of circular economy-becomes a significant but still barely addressed topic. Following a joint agreement on the need to measure product circularity performance, this paper provides an overview of mechanisms aiming to help industrial practitioners in this task. In fact, three existing approaches to measure product circularity performance have been tested on an industrial case study and criticized regarding both their applicability in industry and their accordance with circular economy principles. Although these methods and tools deliver a first and rapid trend of product circularity performance, the whole complexity of circular economy paradigm is far from being considered. In addition, operational guidance for engineers, designers or managers to improve their products in a circular economy context are missing. As a result, both recommendations for industrial practitioners and guidelines for the design and development of new frameworks, tools and indicators aiming at measuring product circularity performance are provided. This includes cornerstones, key requirements and practical implications to support enhanced circularity measurement that will be developed in further work, accordingly to circular economy paradigm and industrial reality.
Lcm 2013, 2013
Functional Unit (FU) ensures the consideration of comparable product quantities to provide reliab... more Functional Unit (FU) ensures the consideration of comparable product quantities to provide reliable Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results. Although the definition of this FU is essential, it receives only a few attention in the normative texts. A high part of subjectivity is let to the LCA practitioner. In this paper variability sources of the FU definition are identified to propose a more structured and adapted approach. Literature references and data collected among 8 LCA experts on 5 case studies allow us to draw first recommendations towards a more structured FU definition framework.
We focus in this paper on the contribution of a subsystem to the environmental impact of a system... more We focus in this paper on the contribution of a subsystem to the environmental impact of a system. In this way we propose to explore some limits related to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), in particular the consideration of the use phase specificities (for example lifetime, technology or energy mix). Two cases studies concerning AREVA T&D's aluminium electrolysis conversion substations are proposed to illustrate these problems. The first one considers the environmental contribution of a transformer to the electrical substation, whereas the second one studies the contribution of the substation to primary aluminium production. We show that the context specificities of a product should be taken into account in order to assess its real environmental impacts. To ignore them can lead to false conclusions, what is essential to avoid when a company wants to define its eco-design strategy.
ABSTRACT Cet article est la suite de " La conception durable (Partie I) : enjeux et outi... more ABSTRACT Cet article est la suite de " La conception durable (Partie I) : enjeux et outils " paru dans le dernier numéro de Centraliens. Trois applications concrètes de recherches appliquées menées en conception durable au sein du Laboratoire Génie Industriel de Centrale y sont détaillées.