Motivation

The importance of a proper and more conscious use of raw and harmful materials has become more and more evident to foster sustainable manufacturing. Even the unused potential of End of Life (EoL) products needs to be exploited by using paradigms like remanufacturing, refurbishing, repair, and recycling. The extreme customization of manufactured goods and the high complexity of remanufacturing operations are some of the most relevant barriers to the development of a circular economy, together with a biased opinion of the users towards revamped products. This demands extremely variable and flexible processes for the remanufacturing of goods and the support of solutions as well as innovative digital tools for every actor along the value chain and prevents the diffusion of the circular economy and its propagation at a large scale. Additionally, the lack of specifications and standards hampers industry agreements on circularity and sustainability that in turn, negatively affects the dependence on imported raw materials. Thus, the improvement of the skills and knowledge of all the people involved in the remanufacturing chain will blaze innovation and boost new types of businesses in the field of remanufacturing.

Objectives

The long-term vision guiding the RemaNet project is to move from the present rigid remanufacturing paradigm, in which only a few highly skilled and capable protagonists can remanufacture advanced products, to a distributed and widespread business model, enabled by digital tools, that allows multiple players to interact, in order to gain the same capability as a single highly skilled and capable actor. This makes it possible for more companies and users to partake in the circular economy. Such a distributed and collaborative approach can increase the market for SMEs, i.e., allowing parties to perform single steps of the remanufacturing process. Moreover, it is expected that the proposed approach would increase the market for remanufactured products through a distributed certification approach, increasing the perceived value of remanufactured goods by customers and, thus, contributing to improve the competitiveness of European companies in the global market, and with the long-term objective, at establishing a European leadership in the remanufacturing market.

Approaches

At the beginning of the project, all requirements and information needed to start the development phase of the RemaNet solutions are defined and collected. This includes hardware and software requirements for the digital platform.

The next step is the development and implementation of the platform tools. On the one hand, this includes the development of horizontal digital tools that are used on the platform level and with regard to knowledge formalization. On the other hand, digital tools are being developed that relate exclusively to the workshop environment and range from forecasting tools to adaptation and flexibility tools for reconditioning. The applicability and effectiveness of the tools developed will be demonstrated in four different use cases (machine park, electric motor, automotive industry, energy). In the automotive industry use case, the CiP research group at PTW will apply the Value Stream Method 4.0, which was further developed for remanufacturing as part of the project, to the remanufacturing of various components for the automotive sector at ZF. In the energy use case, the TEC research group will play a key role in testing the digital tools and sensor-controlled cutting tools developed in the project for the remanufacturing of gas compressors for the conversion to hydrogen compression at Siemens Energy.

At the end of the project, the consolidation and implementation of communication, dissemination, standardization and exploitation activities by the project's numerous partners in Europe is planned.

We look forward to working with a total of 25 partners, including research institutions from Italy, Germany, Spain, France and Sweden, as well as numerous industrial and technology companies from all over Europe.

Acknowledgement

This project is funded by the European Union as part of the Horizon Europe funding program. We would like to thank you for the opportunity to work on this project.

Funding source

Consortium partners