# Opportunities for Industry 4.0 to Support Remanufacturing
## 1 Introduction  
The growth and stability of the traditional \"take-make-consume-dispose\" linear model has been heavily dependent on the availability of resources. However, the linear model is now challenged by an unprecedented rise in demand for the finite supply of resources, as it is expected that by 2030 there will be three billion more middle-class consumers worldwide [1]. With this in mind, the \"circular economy\" model is drawing global attention as an approach to decouple economic growth from resource constraints. The underlying principle of the \"circular economy\" is to make products and materials restorative and regenerative by design, and to maintain them at their highest utility and value [2].  
Circulation of the technical product life cycle is enabled through several end-of-life (EOL) channels, including recycling, remanufacturing, reusing, refurbishing, etc. Among these EOL strategies, remanufacturing shows noticeable advantages due to its effectiveness in preserving the added value of products and assuring their quality. Remanufacturing is the process of bringing EOL products back to good-as-new status through disassembly, cleaning, inspection/sorting, restoring, and reassembly. It provides social, environmental, and economic benefits by offering to consumers end products with assured quality at a competitive price, while protecting the intellectual property and brand image of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). It also creates and opens up new business and job opportunities in the after-sales service market. Another main advantage of remanufacturing lies in protection of the environment by reducing the usage of raw materials, carbon footprint, and number of components being scrapped. However, the uptake of remanufacturing faces several obstacles, which need to be resolved properly through collaboration among multiple players across the business, government, investors, society, and research communities [3]. Fortunately, the advent of Industry 4.0 has provided immense opportunities for unlocking the potential for remanufacturing by reducing the cost of transformation into a higher level of connectivity and efficiency.  
Industry 4.0, as the name suggests, refers to the fourth stage of industrialization, aiming for a high level of automation in the manufacturing industry through the adoption of ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICTs). The boundaries between the virtual environment and real world get increasingly blurred, which is called \"cyber-physical production systems (CPPSs)\". In simple terms, in CPPSs, electronic and mechanical components are linked through sensors in a network, which provides a smart platform for data flow and data analytics. An early form of this technology is the implementation of radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors, which have been in wide use since the year 1999.  
In this paper, the opportunities that Industry 4.0 bring to the remanufacturing industry are discussed and presented from the perspectives of \"Smart Life Cycle Data\", \"Smart Factory\", and \"Smart Services\". Case studies are presented to exemplify the use of ICT to increase the efficiency and accuracy of the remanufacturing process.