Development of a Digital Thread Tool for Extending the Useful Life of Capital Items in Manufacturing Companies - an Example Applied for the Refurbishment Protocol

Abstract

With the growth of the world's population and depletion of limited resources, economic development is shifting from ‘take-make-waste’ linear model to a sustainable Circular Economic (CE) model. It is becoming essential to extend the useful life of products to avoid throwaway. In the manufacturing industry, this is especially relevant for long-life expensive capital items. Literature has presented many approaches to extend product life, such as refurbishment, upgrade, repair, and recycling. Depending on a capital item's condition, manufacturers perform a series of activities to extend its useful life, such as refurbishment activities followed by upgrade activities. These life extension activities may involve various stakeholders and systems and significantly impact the capital item's life cycle. It is a challenge to enable cross-collaboration between these different stakeholders and systems, and provide manufacturers a holistic view of the activities performed along the entire life cycle of a capital item. The Digital Thread (DT) concept, which has been applied in product lifecycle management and manufacturing, provides an opportunity to tackle these challenges. However, there is little research about developing and applying DT for extending the useful life of capital items in manufacturing companies. This paper presents ongoing research to develop a DT design tool for product life extension. We take the development of a DT sample for the Refurbishment protocol deployment as an example to illustrate the approach. This tool will pave the way to support manufacturers to extend their large capital items' useful life.