Systematic literature review of repair shops: focus on sustainability

ABSTRACT

Maintenance activities are crucial for all manufacturing industries. To ensure availability and lifetime of production equipment, operations management and logistics support for maintenance need to evolve year after year. Besides, Centralised Maintenance Workshops are one of the most interesting approaches to reduce the cost and time required to repair faulty equipment. Generally known in the research community as ‘repair shops’, they aim to pool all the resources needed to repair defective equipment provided by different production sites. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of repair shops and to present opportunities for future research with a focus on the circular economy context. The most relevant papers have been rigorously selected and analyzed, providing interesting reference materials on the subject. Repair shops are a set of workstations, operators, and spare parts inventories required to restore a group of failed production equipment. After detecting the origin of the failures, there are two options: either repair the equipment by restoring its defective components or replace the defective components with others in good working order. In the case of non-repairable components/equipment, circular strategies allow identification of components/equipment that could be restored and used to supply the spare parts warehouse.

KEYWORDS:

• Maintenance
• circular economy
• repair capacity
• spare parts
• repair by replacement
• logistics

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the French government; through the Université Grenoble Alpes and the IDEX Grenoble (Cross Disciplinary Program Circular) under Grant C7H-ID17-PR28-CIRCULARWP1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, “[email protected]”, upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Université Grenoble Alpes and the IDEX Grenoble (Cross Disciplinary Program Circular): [grant number C7H-ID17-PR28-CIRCULARWP1].

Notes on contributors

Rony Arsène Djeunang Mezafack

Rony Arsène Djeunang Mezafack is a PhD Student at Grenoble Institute of Technology, University Grenoble Alpes, France. He is currently in the second year of his thesis at the G-SCOP laboratory on integrated logistics support in a distributed maintenance and circular economy context. During his research, he is interested in Manufacturing Engineering, Industrial Maintenance, Performance Evaluation and Optimisation.

Maria Di Mascolo

Maria Di Mascolo is a Senior Researcher at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), and a member of the G-SCOP (Grenoble-Sciences for Design, Optimisation, and Production) laboratory. Her main scientific interests are related to the modelling, analysis, and optimisation of systems for the production of goods and services. She co-leads the GISEH (Hospital Systems Management and Engineering) working group of the SAGIP (French Society of Automatic Control, Industrial and Systems Engineering) https://www.sagip.org/fr/gt/giseh and is editor-in-chief of the ISTE OpenScience journal ‘Industrial and Systems Engineering’, https://www.openscience.fr/Industrial-and-Systems-Engineering?lang=en. She is a Deputy Head of Sustainable Industrial Engineering Master's degree at Grenoble Institute of Technology.

Zineb Simeu-Abazi

Zineb Simeu-Abazi is Professor at the Polytech Grenoble in the University Grenoble Alpes where she teaches control processing, Automation and Industrial Engineering, dependability and Industrial Maintenance. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Automation at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, INPG France on 1987 and an « Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches’ » HDR in 1998, from Grenoble University, France. She works on modelling, control and evaluation of dependability in the manufacturing systems. She is particularly interested in the on line maintenance, diagnostic, recycling and performance evaluation fields. In relation to these topics she took scientific responsibility of French and International projects/groups on e-maintenance.