Modular grouping exploration to design remanufacturable products

Abstract

One of the challenges of this decade is to rationalize the consumption of global resources while increasing economic activity. Remanufacturing is an option to this challenge; however this end of life strategy must be optimized. The information collected from a franking machine manufacturer, which has set up a refurbishment activity of its machines, has allowed us to qualify remanufacturing as a home-made process in many cases. This paper focuses on aspects of product Architecture. The purpose of the approach proposed in this paper is to reorganize the classical architectures towards modular architectures allowing a much more industrialized remanufacturing.