Systematic literature review of repair shops: focus on sustainability

Maintenance activities are crucial for all manufacturing industries. To ensure availability and lifetime of production equipment, operations management and logistics support for maintenance need to evolve year after year. Besides, Centralised Maintenance Workshops are one of the most interesting approaches to reduce the cost and time required to repair faulty equipment. Generally known in the research community as ‘repair shops’, they aim to pool all the resources needed to repair defective equipment provided by different production sites. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of repair shops and to present opportunities for future research with a focus on the circular economy context. The most relevant papers have been rigorously selected and analyzed, providing interesting reference materials on the subject. Repair shops are a set of workstations, operators, and spare parts inventories required to restore a group of failed production equipment. After detecting the origin of the failures, there are two options: either repair the equipment by restoring its defective components or replace the defective components with others in good working order. In the case of non-repairable components/equipment, circular strategies allow identification of components/equipment that could be restored and used to supply the spare parts warehouse.