Flexible restoration for remanufacture of rolling stock components

Increasingly stringent environmental regulations such as Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and End-of-Life (EoL) Vehicle Directive require the reuse of waste. Remanufacturing adds value to waste streams by returning End-of-Life items to working order rather than reducing them to their raw material value only, and preserves more than 80% of the material and energy used to manufacture a new product [PEARL, 2010], thus is considered as an important element of a circular economy.

Restoration, which returns defective parts back to service life is a critical operation of remanufacturing and could account for up to 50% of total remanufacturing cost. Currently restoration is still ad-hoc. Focusing at one-off production resulting from the differential quality of returned defective products, this feasibility study aims to assess and validate a new flexible restoration for the remanufacture of rolling stock components.

The project will address one of the major challenges facing the remanufacturing industry which, largely as a result of the variable quality of feedstock, operates at low efficiency and high cost. The study tackles the problem from two aspects: (i) the reuse of knowledge to reduce repetitive work and enhance intelligence in decision making, and (ii) enabling efficient customisation for restoration operations. The study has the potential to result in a step change in the restoration process of defective parts, thus leading to increased productivity, competitiveness and growth for the UK remanufacturing industry.