Module reconfiguration management for circular factories without discriminating between virgin and reused products

In the face of worsening environmental problems, the manufacturing industry is required to reduce environmental loads and resource consumption over product life cycles while also responding to diverse user needs and not increasing costs. In this paper, we consider a circular factory in which remanufacturing is carried out not as an auxiliary means but as an alternative to conventional manufacturing. In the circular factory, products are reconfigured using reused modules extracted from returned products and newly produced modules without discriminating between virgin and reused products. We discuss the optimal method to reconfigure modules in order to reduce costs and environmental load while satisfying various user needs. The proposed reconfiguration method is applied to copy machines to demonstrate its effectiveness.