A hybrid method of blockchain and case-based reasoning for remanufacturing process planning

Remanufacturing plays a vital role in promoting the development of circular economy for its great advantages in energy saving, material saving and emission reduction. Remanufacturing process planning (RPP), which affects the performance of remanufacturing greatly, becomes increasingly important to the remanufacturing enterprises. In general, RPP is knowledge dependent. Some remanufacturing enterprises, especially small and middle-sized remanufacturing enterprises (SMREs) may have inadequate remanufacturing knowledge, which makes it difficult to implement a proper RPP. Therefore, how to share and make full use of the knowledge in different remanufacturing enterprises for RPP has become a bottleneck. To this end, a hybrid method integrating blockchain (BC) and case-based reasoning (CBR) for RPP, which can take full advantage of the remanufacturing knowledge by cross enterprises knowledge sharing, is presented in this paper. In this proposed method, a BC network was utilized to record the remanufacturing knowledge and its associated transactions to guarantee the security and reliability of knowledge sharing, and CBR was employed to retrieve and reuse the most suitable solution by analyzing the similarity between previous remanufacturing cases and new case with the nearest neighbor algorithm. Finally, a used lathe guideway was set as a case study to verify the feasibility and superiority of the proposed approach. The hybrid method has been applied in a prototype system written in HTML and JavaScript. The results indicated that the proposed approach can effectively help SMREs to obtain optimum solutions for RPP with comprehensive economic, environmental and social benefits.