Abstract
The adoption of the Circular Economy paradigm by industry leads to increased responsibility of manufacturing to ensure a holistic awareness of the environmental impact of its operations. In mitigating negative effects in the environment, current maintenance practice must be considered for its potential contribution to a more sustainable lifecycle for the manufacturing operation, its products and related services. Focusing on the matching of digital technologies to maintenance practice in the automotive sector, this paper outlines a framework for organisations pursuing the integration of environmentally aware solutions in their production systems. This research sets out an agenda and framework for digital maintenance practice within the Circular Economy and the utilisation of Industry 4.0 technologies for this purpose.
Highlights
Circular Manufacturing is considered among the six disruptive manufacturing trends according to the World Manufacturing Forum (WMF, 2018)
The relationship between maintenance en gineering and management with production, supply chain, and lo gistics management has received significant attention and its role as a value adding activity is highlighted in international standardisation activities (e.g. ISO 55000 family of standards on asset management, EN 14485:2021 on Maintenance within Asset Management: Frame work for improving the value of the physical assets through their whole lifecycle), it is still considered in many fields as a cost source
Holistic methodologies for sustainable maintenance practice exist in the form of value stream mapping, where sustainability measures may be combined with other practices, such as lean, to scope improve ment actions in current maintenance activities (Kasava et al, 2015)
Summary
Circular Manufacturing is considered among the six disruptive manufacturing trends according to the World Manufacturing Forum (WMF, 2018). Industry 4.0 technologies, as well as integrated modelling of different production, maintenance, and supply chain processes within Digital Twin concepts can play a key role in establishing the sustainability and business impact benefits. Similar methodologies are applicable to automotive industry (Sari et al, 2015) and it is of interest to examine how maintenance practice can be aligned with circular manufacturing goals. Yang et al (2015) provide a methodology to assess the environ mental impact of extending the lifecycle of products through re manufacture, proposing a framework to establish the environmental gain from this action at the design stage, along with automotive industry case study examples featuring alternators and engine blocks. A further discussion of the driver and barriers for remanufacturing may be found in Chakraborty et al (2019)
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