Human-oriented maintenance and disassembly in sustainable manufacturing

Abstract This paper aims to enhance human involvement in equipment maintenance and product disassembly, which are essential in product end-of-life (EOL) planning and achieving sustainable manufacturing. Maintenance operations can extend the production lifespan of machinery, whereas disassembly is an essential step in EOL processes, such as reusing, recycling and remanufacturing. Notably, most maintenance activities and disassembly operations are still conducted manually. Hence, an integrated framework that considers appropriate human factors and ergonomic conditions in these two phases is proposed. First, a review on current approaches in sustainable manufacturing, such as through-life engineering services and continuous maintenance is presented. Next, an integrated framework for maintenance and disassembly based on advanced human computer interaction and soft computing techniques is described. In the maintenance phase, a sensor network that tracks the steps performed by a user during maintenance operations is implemented. The proposed network can account for situations where the user is far away from the maintenance job area and when the user is carrying out the actual maintenance job. This tracking data and information will serve as a basis for comparison to obtain maintenance quality related information and provide real time ergonomics feedback. This information is utilized for disassembly optimisation with human factors consideration. In line with Industry 4.0 concept, this framework allows (i) improvement of maintenance quality with the inclusion of steps tracking during disassembly and maintenance operations and (ii) monitoring and consideration of the well-being of operators. Case studies are implemented to illustrate the proposed framework followed by discussion and conclusion with future work.