# A Review on the Lifecycle Strategies Enhancing Remanufacturing
###### Abstract  
Remanufacturing is a domain that has increasingly been exploited during recent years due to its numerous advantages and the increasing need for society to promote a circular economy leading to sustainability. Remanufacturing is one of the main end-of-life (EoL) options that can lead to a circular economy. There is therefore a strong need to prioritize this option over other available options at the end-of-life stage of a product because it is the only recovery option that maintains the same quality as that of a new product. This review focuses on the different lifecycle strategies that can help improve remanufacturing; in other words, the various strategies prior to, during or after the end-of-life of a product that can increase the chances of that product being remanufactured rather than being recycled or disposed of after its end-of-use. The emergence of the fourth industrial revolution, also known as industry 4.0 (14.0), will help enhance data acquisition and sharing between different stages in the supply chain, as well boost smart remanufacturing techniques. This review examines how strategies like design for remanufacturing (DfRem), remaining useful life (RUL), product service system (PSS), closed-loop supply chain (CLSC), smart remanufacturing, EoL product collection and reverse logistics (RL) can enhance remanufacturing. We should bear in mind that not all products can be remanufactured, so other options are also considered. This review mainly focuses on products that can be remanufactured. For this review, we used 181 research papers from three databases; Science Direct, Web of Science and Scopus. remanufacturing; end-of-life (EoL); circular economy (CE); closed-loop supply chain (CLSC); design for remanufacturing (DfRem); remaining useful life (RUL) +
Footnote †: journal: Applied Sciences  
by various authors [7; 8; 9; 10]. In reality, most products will eventually end up being recycled, incenerated or landfill, but remanufacturing ensures that the product can have multiple lifecycles before getting to the stage where it has no remaining useful life (RUL) and thereby can be recycled, which is the final recovery option. The environmental and economic assessments in remanufacturing have been well evaluated by [11] and the economic benefits in terms of cost savings have been analyzed by [12]. The environmental benefits of remanufacturing have a great role to play with regard to attaining sustainability [13] and a case study on a truck injector case has been used to demonstrate these benefits. The profit margins of remanufacturing are also very attractive, with final remanufactured products being sold at 40% lower prices than those of new products and making profits of about 20% [14]. This is quite outstanding and shows how beneficial this domain is for all the three pillars of sustainability; namely, they are environmentally friendly, very economic and good for society as well. In terms of social benefits, remanufacturing can create job opportunities as well as new skills due to the flexible nature of its processes, such as disassembling, testing and re-assembling. Remanufacturing is nowadays more common in the transport sectors, which have capital intensive and durable products with relatively longer product lifecycles ((USITC) [15]. These transport sectors include the automobile, aerospace/aircraft, ship building and railway industries. [PERSON] et al. [16] pointed out the issues faced during the remanufacture of automobile parts. Due to their longer lifecycles and higher values, remanufacturing is the most economic and reasonable recovery option [17]. In the aerospace industry, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are strongly involved in the remanufacturing of their products to avoid competition from third party remanufacturers, as well as to preserve the image of their products (Centre of Remanufacturing and Reuse (CRR)). High performance products, such as caterpillars' heavy duty engines, can be remanufactured as many as six times before they come to be recycled [10].