Resilient Remanufacturing Networks (ReRuN) - Forecasting, Informatics and Holons

Professor Aris Syntetos from Cardiff Business School has been awarded £412k from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to explore new models for waste reduction and efficiencies.

The 'ReRuN' project, led by Professor Syntetos, commenced in January 2017. It runs for two years and also involves colleagues Professor Mohamed Naim, Borja Ponte Balnco, Dr Shixuan Wang from Cardiff Business School and Dr Ying Liu from Cardiff School of Engineering.

The world economy is currently evolving from a linear model, which extracts resources and manufactures products that are disposed of after use, to a circular model, which keeps resources in use for as long as possible by collecting and recovering products at the end of their cycle life. Remanufacturing is one of the main cornerstones of this emerging circular model. Indeed, the value of remanufacturing within the UK economy already represents £2.4B, which according to relevant and recent studies will increase to £5.6B in the near future.

In remanufacturing contexts, operations rely upon the quality of the returned-used items. This introduces a need to forecast not only the rate of the returns, but also their quality, in order to assess which usable parts can be fed back into the manufacturing process and what parts need to be replaced. There has been very little research in the area of forecasting for remanufacturing operations.

Further, there have been no studies to-date that look at returns forecasting and how such forecasts can be integrated in a systemic way with inventory and production optimisation procedures, and this constitutes the main objective of our study. Such procedures are stepping-stones towards financial, environmental and societal sustainability.

Our vision is to create a sustainable and resilient world where remanufacturers and their closed-loop supply networks have ‘visibility’ of product returns and reflect such information into circular economy compatible inventory and production optimization to improve sustainability and resilience.

Industrial partners

• British Telecommunications Plc
• Brother International Europe Ltd
• MCT Reman Ltd
• Panalpina World Transport Ltd
• Qioptic Ltd.

Policy advisors

• Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP)
• Conseil Européen de Remanufacture (CER).

For further information about the project, please contact Borja Ponte Blanco.

Funder