Sustainability and circularity in reconfigurable manufacturing - literature review and future research directions

Reconfigurability is widely acknowledged as a foundation for achieving sustainable manufacturing, while also being an enabler for establishing circular manufacturing. However, further clarifications of how reconfigurable manufacturing can support sustainable manufacturing are necessary. Thus, there is a need to further investigate how reconfigurability can help companies in achieving sustainable manufacturing and to identify future research directions. In this paper, a literature review was conducted to categorise, describe, and summarise the previously conducted research on reconfigurable manufacturing in relation to sustainability. The literature review was conducted in the database Scopus and 265 papers were initially reviewed. After excluding papers not fulfilling the inclusion criteria, 79 papers were analysed in detail using five different categorisations. Based on these categorisations, the previously conducted research on sustainability and reconfigurable manufacturing was analysed. Several frequently discussed sustainability focus areas were identified and described, as well as suggestions of future research directions.