Sustainability Assessment Through Simulation: The Case of Fashion Renting

The fashion industry is widely known as one of the most environmentally impacting. To address the overconsumption issue, the fashion renting business model allows renting clothes or accessories instead of buying them, extending the useful life of products. However, concerns about the sustainability of fashion renting supply chains are arisen, especially due to reverse logistics. In this context, a hybrid simulation model is developed to support fashion companies in the design and evaluation of renting supply chain configurations. Through Discrete Event Simulation (DES) logistics flows are represented, while Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) integrated with Geographic Information System (GIS) allow to represent supply chain's nodes in the real environment. GIS concurs to estimate the sustainability of the supply chain importing effective data related to the covered distances. The proposed parametric model will enable performing scenario analyses to assess the best configuration in terms of environmental impact.