The ‘Internet of Things’ enabled real-time scheduling for remanufacturing of automobile engines

Typical challenges that managers of remanufacturing face are composed of the lack of timely, accurate, and consistent information of remanufacturing resources. Therefore, it is difficult to implement real-time production scheduling for the shop floor. To address this problem, the authors applied the concept of the ‘Internet of Things’ to the remanufacturing of automobile engines to form an Internet of Manufacturing Things environment. Under the Internet of Manufacturing Things, an identification technology for disassembled engine parts was designed, and the real-time status of the remanufacturable resources can be monitored. Based on the captured remanufacturing information, a real-time production scheduling method was developed, and a mathematical model was developed to achieve cost reduction, dynamic management of remanufacturable resources, and energy consumption decrease. To obtain an optimal solution, a Pareto-based optimization method was used. Finally, a case study was performed to analyze the effectivity of the proposed method. The results showed that the remanufacturing cost and energy consumption were reduced by 34% and 34% respectively, and the worker load rate was more balanced. These improvements can contribute to more sustainable development and greener production within the remanufacturing industry, especially for remanufacturing of automobile engines.