Digital twin-based WEEE recycling, recovery and remanufacturing in the background of Industry 4.0

The waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) recovery can be categorised into two types, i.e. recycling at the material level and remanufacturing at the component level. However, the WEEE recovery is facing enormous challenges of diversified individuals, lack of product knowledge, distributed location, and so forth. On the other hand, the latest ICT provides new methods and opportunities for industrial operation and management. Thus, in this research digital twin and Industry 4.0 enablers are introduced to the WEEE remanufacturing industry. The goal is to provide an integrated and reliable cyber-avatar of the individual WEEE, thus forming personalised service system. The main contribution presented in this paper is the novel digital twin-based system for the WEEE recovery to support the manufacturing/remanufacturing operations throughout the product's life cycle, from design to recovery. Meanwhile, the international standard-compliant data models are also developed to support WEEE recovery services with high data interoperability. The feasibility of the proposed system and methodologies is validated and evaluated during implementations in the cloud and cyber-physical system.