Conference Agenda

The growing demand for batteries has increased the importance of secure, sustainable, and resilient battery value chains. At the same time, battery manufacturers face new challenges arising from regulatory requirements, sustainability objectives, critical raw material dependencies, and operational disruptions. These challenges require companies to consider compliance, transparency, circularity, and supply chain risks alongside traditional objectives such as cost, quality, and delivery performance.

Although large volumes of compliance, sustainability, and operational data are becoming available, limited research has examined how this information can support battery value chain reconfiguration. Existing studies often address compliance and resilience separately, providing limited guidance on how assessment results can be translated into value chain adaptation and reconfiguration decisions.

Meanwhile, Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) provides the mechanism for discovering and selecting alternative actors and capabilities within the value chain. Extending upon this concept, this paper proposes a conceptual framework for sustainable and compliant battery value chains integrating MaaS as an enabling mechanism for reconfiguring distributed manufacturing resources. The framework consists of assessment, filtering and evaluation of value chain actors using compliance information and regulations, sustainability indicators, and operational data such as geographic location, logistics, and disruptions. This enables decision-makers to evaluate and compare different viable reconfiguration alternatives.

The applicability of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a proof-of-concept decision support tool, applied within a battery value chain context. Using lithium-ion batteries as the unit of analysis, the tool illustrates how regulatory compliance, sustainability requirements, and operational performance can be integrated to reconfigure the value chain. Following the framework, the tool first applies compliance-based filtering and subsequently evaluates feasible configurations according to criteria such as cost, lead time, capacity, distance, emissions, and resilience.

In conclusion, this research contributes a structured approach for transforming compliance, sustainability, and operational information into value chain reconfiguration decisions. This approach supports the development of sustainable, resilient, and compliant battery value chains.