Remanufacturing Data Space – a vision to favour circularity

Remanufacturing represents an effective approach to the circular economy, pursuing several sustainability principles, mainly related to the economic and environmental spheres. However, realizing a production environment completely dedicated to remanufacturing is very challenging for companies interested in this business: the high investments needed, the uncertainty on the quality of the products to remanufacture and the still low acceptance of remanufactured products by end-users represent some of the barriers that a company has to face when dealing with remanufacturing. This paper aims to propose a possible approach to address some of the aforementioned barriers. Leveraging on the use of modern Information and Communication Technologies, the logics and tools for the realization of a Data Space Ecosystem (DSE) dedicated to remanufacturing are presented. Within the DSE, different remanufacturing stakeholders (companies acting as remanufacturing service providers and end users or clients) can interact, favoring the collaboration among companies through data/information exchange and resources/assets sharing. This should allow for a reduction of investment costs and other benefits for companies, based on a raise of knowledge on the remanufacturing processes, which can be, in some cases, very difficult to carry out efficiently.