Changeable Manufacturing Systems Supporting Circular Supply Chains

Sustainability is gaining more attention as a result of climate change and depleting resources. In manufacturing industry one way of becoming more sustainable is by introducing circular supply chains, by taking back used products from the market and in various ways turning them into new products. This however presents a number of challenges since current practices and research on manufacturing system design have primarily been concerned with open loop supply chains, where new products are manufactured from virgin materials. This research investigates how different types of circular supply chains can be supported by the concepts from changeable manufacturing systems. This is done by analyzing how the end-of-life strategies repair, refurbish, and remanufacturing can be enabled by applying the different changeability levels flexibility, changeover ability, and reconfigurability. It is concluded that due to the changing volumes in new products, and returned, used products over time, reconfigurability seems promising, while changeover ability and flexibility will be able to address the variation in the state of incoming products from the market.