Maintenance policies and models: A bibliometric and literature review of strategies for reuse and remanufacturing

Abstract

• Maintenance models and policies with reuse or remanufacture strategies are studied. • Models, business and sustainability strategies of reviewed papers are discussed. • Reuse and remanufacture have been implemented mainly to address economic benefits. • Future work should address environmental and social dimensions of sustainability. • New possibilities for reuse or remanufacture in maintenance contexts are provided. Reuse and remanufacturing have been widely studied in the maintenance related literature due to the imperative of preserving resources and protecting the environment. To provide researchers with a holistic view of the existing research, there is a need to check how relevant methods have been developed. This paper undertakesa bibliometric analysis and a comprehensive literature review of maintenance policies and models that deal with reuse or remanufacturing as sustainable strategies. A total of 581 papers collected from Web of Science, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore databases were analysed. 53 of them were chosen for further investigation after four selection criteria were applied. The bibliometric analysis provided a general understanding of the publication trends while the literature review built a taxonomy that organises the related literature under the dimensions of models, businesses, and sustainable strategies, which creates novelty in the maintenance-sustainability related literature. The main contribution is the classification of related papers and identification of the main knowledge gaps, including the neglect of the environmental and social aspects of sustainability vis-à-vis the prioritisation of an economic perspective.