Towards Smart Remanufacturing and Maintenance of Machinery - Review of Automated Inspection, Condition Monitoring and Production Optimisation

Modern manufacturing has made huge progress in production efficiency. However, the status of machinery in production line deteriorates during production, subsequently, their condition can affect the quality of products, and also leads to unexpected failure and consequent disturbance to the production. In order to address this problem, smart remanufacturing and maintenance should be carried out for machinery. Current remanufacturing and maintenance are largely carried out by inefficient manual process and also lack smart tools to understand the impact of remanufacturing and maintenance to the current production. To go towards smart remanufacturing and maintenance in the era of Industry 4.0, automated inspection, condition monitoring and integrated optimisation of production and maintenance planning is necessary. In this article, the prior research on these topics was reviewed. Articles from peer-reviewed academic journals with high impact factors were found by using the related keywords and studied according to their research topics. It is found that the automated product inspection and tool condition monitoring have been studied, but they were not much integrated for the optimisation of production and maintenance planning. The integration of automated product inspection, tool condition monitoring, and optimisation of production and maintenance planning is a potential future research direction. This potential research can not only help to improve performance, but also reduce cost and waste of production, remanufacturing and maintenance.