Remanufacturing system: Characterizing the reverse supply chain

Abstract

End-of-life strategies, such as remanufacturing, have gained ground in order to promote product reuse, reduce environmental impacts and costs, as well as to win new markets. The remanufacturing process preserves part of the product's raw materials and added value during its manufacturing. This study addresses the system that includes remanufacturing in order to understand it and to define its elements, as well as to characterize the supply chain that permeates and leads to the effective functioning of this system. To this end, a Systematic Literature Review on remanufacturing was conducted. Moreover, the RS proposed was based on the General Systems Theory. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.