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The proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs) globally is remarkable progress in strides toward a low carbon society. However, the volume of end-of-life EV batteries will hit a critical mass in the future. Widespread adoption of EV battery remanufacturing is essential in achieving higher resource efficiency. The current study investigated Chinese EV owners’ perceptions of remanufactured EV batteries: 420 respondents in China who own and drive EVs participated in the survey. This study modeled respondents’ acceptance, purchase intention, and willingness-to-pay for remanufactured EV batteries by adapting the structural equation model (SEM). The results showed that consumers’ price consciousness and perceived benefits both directly influence their purchase intention of remanufactured batteries. Unlike previous studies, this study found that consumers’ perceived risks on remanufactured batteries do not directly influence their purchase intention. Instead, the influence of perceived risks on purchasing behavior is mediated by perceived benefits. The study also found that purchase intention affects willingness to pay and acceptance of remanufactured batteries. Drawing on our study results, this research suggests measures to promote markets for remanufactured EV batteries and provides corporate marketing options to accelerate proliferation of remanufactured batteries.

In this study, we assessed the environmental impact of the remanufacturing of mining machinery components, by analyzing commonly used parts in a machine setup. No previous studies have conducted a detailed environmental impact assessment of any manufacturing processes for new or remanufactured components used in mining machinery. We analyzed the system boundaries and conducted inventory analysis to understand their function and determine their unit role in the machine. Then, we evaluated the environmental impacts of the manufacturing processes for the subparts and assy parts, along with the impact of logistic and remanufacturing processes. In particular, we assessed hydraulic equipment, which is a common component of mining machinery, and conducted a comparative assessment of the environmental impacts of new and remanufactured components. Our results indicated that the global warming potential (GWP) per mining machine throughout its lifecycle (LC) could be reduced by ~194 ton-CO2eq./LC. Assuming that the number of mining machinery in operation at a global scale is 571 machines (or units) per year, the GWP would be reduced by ~110,000 ton-CO2eq./year.

Sustainable consumption and production (SCP) is a key to envisioning the desirable linkage between consumers and producers for transforming the mass production paradigm. The authors have proposed a method for designing scenarios to describe visions and pathways for SCP. This paper proposes a method for quantifying scenarios using expert workshops to clarify effective SCP measures. That is, we develop a simplified model to help workshop participants execute iterative cycles of changing parameter values and evaluate the environmental effects of SCP measures. In a case study, a scenario for Vietnam was quantified to extract conditions for halving CO2 emissions in 2050.

Compared with a variety of Design for Environment (DfE) methods (such as design for reduce, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling), one of the major characteristics of life cycle design is to consider interrelations among the processes across the life cycle stages. In literature, such interrelations have been viewed from flows of materials, products, and energy. To support design and analysis of product life cycles dealing with these flows, engineering tools such as Material Flow Analysis (MFA) and Life Cycle Simulation (LCS) have been studied by scholars in the field of life cycle engineering. However, related works in the field of life cycle engineering mainly focus on flows of physical objects and they do not sufficiently consider information flows in product life cycles. Therefore, the authors have recently developed a simulation framework to design and analyze interactions among constituents of a system with a variety of resolutions (e.g., a process line, a factory, a life cycle) in terms of flows of information and physical objects. The authors develop a recycling system model to be integrated in a life cycle model on the simulation framework. Especially, structural model elements representing facilities used in specific recycling processes (such as separation, sorting, and crashing) are developed based on investigation of specifications of these facilities in market. The facility models are intended to be used for systematically evaluating recycling systems with various combinations of facilities. This paper presents how these facility models are used to structurally and graphically build a recycling system simulation model based on models of interactions among facilities through a case to develop a recycling system of laptop computers.

The consumption of products, including automobiles, has been increasing rapidly in Asian developing and transition (D&T) countries, and appropriate diffusion of remanufacturing in the region is necessary to achieve sustainable consumption and production. This paper presents analyses of consumer perceptions of remanufactured auto parts (RAPs) in three Southeast Asian D&T countries: Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The authors conducted internet questionnaire surveys, targeting 500 respondents in each country, and examined consumers' knowledge of RAPs, perceptions of the benefits and risks, and consumers' purchase intentions of RAPs. Our study reveals that consumers' knowledge and perceived benefits of RAPs positively affect consumers' purchase intentions of RAPs in all three countries, but the influence of the perceived risks is not found. The cross-comparison of the perceptions in the countries reveals that knowledge of RAPs and the perceived benefits and risks are relatively high in Vietnam compared to those in Malaysia and Thailand. This study analyzes if consumers have a higher preference for certified RAPs than uncertified ones. A higher level of quality assurance in a country is critical for product diffusion in the market. The study clarifies that the purchasing decisions are also influenced by the country-of-origin (COO) of RAPs. Drawing on our study results, we suggest measures to promote markets for remanufactured products in D&T countries and provide policy options to accelerate the promotion of resource efficiency practices.

Remanufacturing is a key strategy for achieving a circular economy. One crucial obstacle to remanufacturing is consumers’ acceptance (or non-acceptance) of remanufactured products. The current study investigated Indonesian consumers’ perceived images of remanufactured auto parts (RAPs) remanufactured in China. Consumers’ perception of a target country can be either helpful or damaging for an international business. If China seeks successful remanufacturing operations across national boundaries, it must establish national branding and manage the image of remanufactured products to meet and exceed consumer expectations in the global market. An online survey with 500 respondents was conducted to examine (1) how basic product knowledge of RAPs influence consumers’ perceived risks and benefits, (2) whether consumers’ purchase intention of RAPs made in the home country influences their purchase intention of RAPs made in China, and (3) whether the trust in the RAP certification increases purchase intention of RAPs.

Increased car ownership-levels in Southeast-Asian developing countries may lead to extensive environmental and social issues, thus unsustainable development. Car sharing is one promising approach to change the way people use cars. Socio-demographic, psychological, or infrastructural attributes (variables) are influential factors of transport mode choice and may determine the adoption and diffusion of car sharing services in the Southeast-Asia region. In this article, we focus on several factors that might affect the decision toward car sharing use in the Southeast-Asia region, where car sharing is so far effectively non-existent. This paper presents the result of a preparatory study conducting comprehensive literature reviews and semi-structured interviews performed in Thailand and Indonesia to understand the potentially influential factors for car sharing adoption in the Southeast-Asia region. Based on the preparatory study, this paper also formulates the hypotheses that the identified factors positively (or negatively) influence the car sharing adoption intention. It is hoped that these hypotheses will be further tested by statistical analysis to investigate the interplay among the factors, and car sharing decisions of Southeast-Asian residents. The findings will give us implications for business opportunities and policies to promote environmentally-sustainable car sharing services in the Southeast-Asia region.

In recent years, increasing the efficient use of material resources by circulating them (through reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling) has become an important global goal. However, quantitative methods of measuring resource efficiency during the product life cycle have not previously been established. In this study, we built a framework for a measurement method with two features. The first feature concerns the change in a product’s value due to the reuse, refurbishing, and remanufacturing of products. The second feature is the difference in environmental impact based on the type of material used. As a case study, we formulated five scenarios for refrigerated showcases. In our presentation, we review existing methods for measuring the resource efficiency of products and present our proposed method. Then, we introduce the refrigerated showcase product business of Panasonic Corporation. Next, we describe the baseline and four alternative scenarios developed for our analysis, and we present the results as calculated using different methods. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of the various measurement methods.

Researchers have found how driving electric vehicles (EVs) can be one solution to the negative environmental impact of petrol or diesel cars because they produce substantially lower emissions and are more energy-efficient than conventional cars. EVs are predicted to be the disruptive market force for transportation and technology. Of one million EVs sold in 2017, more than half of global sales were in China. China has a strong leadership position in the EV industry. The purpose of this study is to examine the US consumers’ reliance on Country-Of-Origin (COO) information in evaluating the quality of the Chinese-brand EVs (CBEVs) made-in various countries. Researchers suggest that consumers use COO as an information cue when evaluating a product, particularly if they lack detailed knowledge of the product. The results show that the perceived product quality of electric vehicles made in various countries influences consumers’ purchasing behavior. The study also found that consumers’ ethnocentrism has an effect on their buying behavior.

Decisions made in the development stage of a new products will affect the whole lifecycle of the product. Manufacturing costs, product performance, maintainability and customer satisfaction in the use phase are parameters the engineers need to consider. In a sustainability perspective can durability and a potential long lifetime with less breakdowns be regarded as positive. Additionally, in a circular economy perspective the potentials for easy disassembly, recyclability and remanufacturing or reuse at the end of life are important. The selection of precision levels and tolerance limits on geometry and material properties in the design phase of mechanical components are decisive for these aspects. While tolerance selections traditionally focused most on meeting customer requirements and interchangeability of parts for assembly, the product development engineers are now facing several “Design for X”—challenges where tolerance selections and distributions are one of the key issues. This paper describes a Closed Loop Tolerance Engineering (CLTE) model describing information flow for tolerance engineering throughout the product lifecycle. The model includes feed forward and feedback of data and information between functional requirements description, tolerance synthesis and analysis, manufacturing process capabilities, measured product performance and end-of-life considerations.

The vision and the concept of cyber physical system (CPS) has been gaining more and more interest in recent years. Physical artifacts become more and more closely intertwined with their corresponding models in cyberspace and can be designed and controlled as cyber physical artifacts that are to exhibit optimal performance throughout their entire life cycles by using these models. A connected car, which allows the car to share internet access with other devices to enable safe and optimal navigation, and manufacturing equipment that allows information sharing with other devices for optimizing its operation and maintenance are typical examples of such artifacts. For the success of cyber physical artifacts, an adequate description of use case scenarios as well as usage patterns and functions of systems to be developed is essential. Although many researches have been conducted to improve effectiveness and efficiency of production stages by using CPS, less attention is paid to those in products’ recovery processes (e.g. reuse, repair, remanufacturing, and recycling). To demonstrate the potential of CPS adoption in product recovery processes, the paper designs and proposes CPS utilization scenarios in product recovery processes that can improve through life performance of artifacts.

Remanufacturing is one of the key determinants in enhancing resource efficiency of economies and pursuing circular economy. Facilitating international remanufacturing supply chain enhances the effects of remanufacturing. This study focused on the current scenario in remanufacturing businesses and related policies in Southeast Asia through interviews with 12 companies in 4 Southeast Asian countries, namely Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Philippines, and 5 Japan-based companies having remanufacturing facilities in Southeast Asia. The study presents the barriers for the remanufacturing businesses and debates on the roles of the governments to promote remanufacturing.

Circular manufacturing such as product remanufacturing, refurbishment, and repair is a key element in promoting a circular economy, whereas enhancing its resource-efficiency-increasing-effects is often dictated by the critical process of material surface restoration. One of the key technologies that enable effective material surface and geometry restoration is additive manufacturing (AM). This study presents, firstly, a survey of the existing industrial usage of AM in circular manufacturing, which includes applications of re-coating, cladding, and thermal spray. The survey was mainly conducted in three countries, namely, Japan, Norway and India. Secondly, the study presents a review of research and development of the applications of metal 3D printing—an advanced AM. Challenges hindering the promotion of AM applications in circular manufacturing are laid on a process-to-process basis. In general, such challenges include advancement of process automations, design for restoration, quality enhancement of metal 3D printing-based restoration, and cost reduction of the process applications.

In the manufacturing industry, information about products accumulated through the whole life cycle such as design descriptions, usage data, and failure event history is considered crucial to innovate the industry’s value propositions. Although such information can be used to increase the efficiency of the operations and decision makings in the end-of-life stage, such information is not effectively shared and used by the potential stakeholders involved in the life cycle of products. In order to analyze the value of information sharing among the stakeholders and design a system to realize desired information sharing, this study proposes a simulation-based approach to specify the external and internal requirements of such a system and evaluate the impact of the system on resource circulation and profitability of the stakeholders.

Much attention is being paid to sustainable development goals (SDGs), among which the focus of this paper is on sustainable consumption and production (SCP) in Southeast Asia. The key challenge here is to minimize resource and energy consumption while ensuring an appropriate level of quality of life (QOL). The research question is how visions of SCP in this region in 2050 look like and how the pathways to these visions from the present should be connected. To answer this question, we take a backcasting scenario design approach to gain insight into SCP visions using expert workshops. Generated ideas are represented in the form of logic trees to clarify the cause-effect chain between goals to achieve the vision and possible actions to be taken. Based on the results, the desirable linkage between consumers and producers is discussed.

This study investigates consumers' perception and their green purchasing behavior relating to remanufactured auto parts (RAPs) in Japan, where RAPs market remains relatively undeveloped. It also reports factors affecting green purchasing behavior in the US, where RAPs enjoy a long history and continuing success. This study uses an internet survey of 500 Japanese and 473 US respondents to examine how underlying factors, such as consumer knowledge of RAPs, perceptions of benefits and risk, and price consciousness, influence the behavioral intentions of consumers. The results indicate that purchase intention is strongly influenced by these underlying factors in two different markets. This study also provides a brief historical review of the growth of the Japanese RAPs market. In the review, stakeholders' influences on consumers’ perception of RAPs are highlighted. The implications of the results and review on effective measures to promote RAPs in Japan and in an economy where markets for remanufactured products are in their early stage of development are discussed.

Although remanufacturing is effective for increasing resource efficiency, its market share is very small in some developing countries. For analyzing market conditions for remanufacturing, this paper proposes a market model to be incorporated in Life Cycle Simulation by employing polynomial logit model. This model successfully simulated market competition among new, remanufactured, and refurbished products. The results suggest the possibility of diffusion of remanufactured products if the circulating system is well established. Polynomial logit model is effective for discussing policy, life cycle design, and product design, since it can map customers’ preference to the attributes of products through the utility function.

Product reuse, refurbishing, and remanufacturing are critical elements in realizing sustainable consumption and production in our society. These are particularly important in Asian region where consumptions of products, materials and energy as well as economies are growing rapidly. The article presents the current situations of reuse, refurbishing, and remanufacturing in Asian region. The study focused on photocopier industry where these activities are actively undertaken and product service systems (PSS) prevail in high levels. Case studies including interviews with OEM remanufacturers and third-party refurbishers in three countries, namely, Japan, Indonesia, and Singapore, were conducted. The article presents the findings and discusses the vision for an effective international cooperative remanufacturing system in the future.

A lot of sensors and big communication volume can be utilized at low cost, and monitoring status of a product and capturing historical data of a product for appropriate product life cycle will be available. In this paper, product information distribution between manufacturers considering DfR (Design for Resource) and recyclers disposing end-of-life products by using IoT technologies is investigated. In particular, authors are focusing on the information needed for life cycle management and trying to identify the specification of information sharing system to support realizing appropriate life cycle of products.

Summary This study compares U.S. and Japanese consumers’ perceptions of remanufactured auto parts. Remanufactured parts have a long history and enjoy continuing success in the U.S. domestic aftermarket. In contrast, although Japan's domestic aftermarket is growing, it remains comparatively underdeveloped. This research examines whether customers’ perceptions of remanufactured products explain their lower acceptance in Japan. Our Internet survey of 440 U.S. and 300 Japanese respondents examined their knowledge of remanufactured auto parts, perceptions of their benefits and risks, and price consciousness. The results reveal that Japanese consumers know less about remanufactured products, perceiving them as entailing lower benefits and greater risk, especially concerning quality, and are less price conscious. Drawing on its results, this study suggests measures to promote markets for remanufactured auto parts in Japan and in economies in which such markets are in an early stage of development.

Remanufacturing is one of the critical elements moving our economy toward one that is circular. Today, remanufacturing is attracting growing attention worldwide. Meanwhile, despite its potential in terms of its effects on both environment and economy, remanufacturing has not yet been sufficiently exploited. This indicates that there exist both drivers for and barriers to an increase in remanufacturing in economies. Although there are both technological and non-technological requirements for remanufacturing, R&D is unavoidable for its promotion. This article outlines trends, drivers, and barriers for remanufacturing, and presents reviews of studies on selected topics in remanufacturing. The selected R&D topics in this article are product design for remanufacturing, additive manufacturing for remanufacturing, operations management in remanufacturing, and business models for remanufacturing.

The topic of emerging mobility services has quickly received attention from scholars and media in recent years. Mobility services employing autonomous buses in transport systems is one such example. Mobility services using emerging technologies are expected to create social, economic, and environmental benefits. However, the potential benefits of emerging mobility services using autonomous technology will not be realized unless self-driving vehicles are accepted and used by many passengers. The recent worldwide pandemic caused us to recognize the benefits of autonomous technologies. This pretest-and-posttest designed research examines the predictors of willingness to ride autonomous buses in a closed environment. The results of this study indicate that a combination of factors, such as societal benefits, attitude and technology adoption, directly and indirectly influence an individual&rsquo, s acceptance of autonomous buses. This study finds that passengers&rsquo, willingness to use emerging mobility services after a sample riding experience is higher than before having a sample riding experience.

To solve problems underlying design and manufacturing we often rely on methodologies of computational intelligence such as machine learning, artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, fuzzy inference systems and smart optimization algorithms. In this Special Issue of the International Journal of Automation Technology, original articles are presented with reference to the engagement of intelligent computation in diverse application areas of design and manufacturing, including manufacturing process monitoring, manufacturing systems management, scheduling, design theory and methodology. The six research papers in this Special Issue propose the use of intelligent computation methodologies to deal with various topics related to manufacturing and design. In particular, the first three papers focus on manufacturing process monitoring with reference to different manufacturing technologies, including tool wear monitoring in drilling of composite materials, sensor monitoring in CNC turning and residual stress prediction in welding. Diverse intelligent approaches such as artificial neural networks and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems are proposed to support manufacturing process monitoring. The fourth paper deals with the manufacturing system level, proposing the employment of a solution algorithm combining metaheuristics and operation simulation for scheduling of production processes. The fifth paper aims at developing tools to guide the manufacturers to manage the technology investment and cost saving target for customer satisfaction based on the application of internet of things. The last paper proposes a methodology to support the introduction of customer requirements in product and service design via a decision support system which exploits artificial intelligence algorithms (machine learning) based on inductive inference, allowing knowledge related to product/service to be mapped, structured and managed to design the service and product semantic model. The editors deeply appreciate all the authors and anonymous reviewers for their effort and excellent work to make this Special Issue unique. We hope that future research on intelligent computation in manufacturing and design will advance manufacturing technology and systems as well as design methodologies.

In this study, scenario analysis for diffusion of future natural gas vehicle (NGV) in Japan was conducted. Natural gas resources are attracting attentions in recent years due to the shale gas revolution. The relative price of natural gas to the price of oil is expected to fall down in the next decades, and NGV possibly has larger economic advantages over conventional gasoline vehicle (GV) for consumers in the future. In terms of CO 2 emissions, NGV emits less CO 2 than general gasoline vehicles, and some other advantages were discovered via comparison. NGV has started diffusing widely in the world and currently total of 19.9 million NGVs are estimated to be hold in the world. In Japan, NGV's diffusion started in 1990, and there are 43,600 NGVs running on roads in present day. In this research, scenario analyses for diffusion of NGVs in future Japan were undertaken. For the analyses, authors used the Bass model as the modeling framework, and set upped three future scenarios for NGV's diffusion in Japan. The first scenario (Scenario 1) simply applied past experience of diffusion trend from early 1990s to 2013 in Japan with saturation level at current day up to 2050. In the second scenario (Scenario 2), the authors made assumptions that NGVs obtain similar shares as that of diesel vehicles (DVs) in the Japanese market in the last decades until 1995. The third scenario (Scenario 3) assumes that NGV's diffusion in the future is just one tenth of the diffusion level in Scenario 2. Being based on these scenario analyses with detailed results, the conditions and requirements for NGV's diffusion to be optimistically realized are discussed.

Remanufacturing is effective for energy and material savings; however, production planning and control in remanufacturing are more complex than those in traditional manufacturing. Developing a reliable forecasting method is critical for facilitating effective production planning and control. This study examined the effectiveness of demand forecasting in remanufacturing by time series analysis. Most existing methods of demand forecasting in remanufacturing assume that the time distributions of new product sales are known and that the time distributions of the demands of remanufactured products are determined by adding the product lifespan to the time distribution of new product sales. In addition, most previous studies focused on relatively long-term demand trends without considering the seasonality of demands. In this study, we examined the Holt–Winters model and the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, both representative time series analysis methods. These methods do not require information regarding the time distributions of new product sales and can handle the seasonality of demands. To examine the effectiveness of these methods, the time series data of the sales of 160 types of remanufactured alternators and starters manufactured by an independent auto parts remanufacturer over a period of 12 years was used. The results of demand forecasting for 2 months yielded average errors of 26.7 % for alternators and 18.4 % for starters, which represent an average improvement of 6.5 points compared to the method involving referencing the demands of the same month of previous year. The implications of the results and future steps are also discussed.

Promoting longer lifetimes and efficient re-use of products has a significant potential to save resources and reduce adverse environmental impacts, especially for products that have large resource footprints related to extraction and production processes, as for instance automobiles. Remanufacturing is a product life extension strategy promoting the effective and efficient re-use of products by replacing worn-out components with used or end-of-life parts restored to &ldquo, like-new&rdquo, condition and functionality. For developing remanufacturing processes, it is important to take into account the consumers&rsquo, perception of remanufactured products, together with factors such as technology and operations management. Previous research has concluded that the perception of a product or service constitutes a critical factor in consumers&rsquo, decision-making. However, there is a lack of studies exploring consumers&rsquo, perceptions of remanufactured parts, especially in Europe. This contribution analyses the results of an on-line survey (n = 203) of Swedish consumers, concerning their familiarity with remanufactured auto parts and their perceptions on associated benefits and risks. The survey revealed that Swedish car owners have limited knowledge about remanufactured parts. On the other hand, they do recognise the benefits of using such parts, without showing a significant risk aversion in their purchase decision. The survey also explored consumers&rsquo, opinion on potential measures to bridge the identified gap in knowledge, revealing that although they would trust a quality certification scheme for remanufactured auto parts&mdash, preferably set up by an industry association&mdash, that would not be the most critical factor in their purchase decision. Concluding, the article points out the potential of policy interventions to raise consumers&rsquo, perception of remanufactured parts to create a market pull for expanding their uptake, and thus increasing the overall resource efficiency in the automotive sector.

This paper provides some insight into factors influencing the car sharing adoption and usage in Southeast-Asian developing countries like Indonesia, where car sharing is just emerging and so far, not effectively existent. This study uses an internet survey of 600 Indonesian respondents to examine how underlying factors, such as perceived benefits of car sharing related to convenience and cost-saving aspects, perceived risks and burdens of car ownership, and perceived values of car ownership as societal status can influence their intention to use car sharing. The results of the ordered logit models reveal that car sharing use intention is influenced by perceived benefits of car sharing and perceived values of car ownership as societal status. Among demographic attributes, income level has a positive effect on car sharing use intention. The implications and proper interpretations in the interplay among them can provide a useful guide to city transportation planners and business owners who attempt to promote car sharing schemes in the Southeast-Asian market like Indonesia.

Remanufacturing is an industrial process that turns used products into new ones with the same quality, functionality, and warranty as new products; it is a critical element for realizing a resource-efficient manufacturing industry and a circular economy. Remanufacturing may involve adding new and better functionality to used products, such as adding more wear-resistant materials to the surface or new sensor systems. Remanufacturing has been undertaken for products such as: automobile parts, machinery, photocopiers, single-use cameras, furniture, and turbine components, etc. It is generally superior to material recycling in terms of energy and material savings. Our project aims to develop technologies necessary for the promotion of remanufacturing and to establish a cooperative network related to remanufacturing. As technical development items, our aim is to develop methods to assess the reliability of parts/components, develop technologies to restore deteriorated metal surfaces of used products, introduce production management methods for remanufacturing, and design a circulation system to retain the added values of products. In this paper, we introduce an outline of the project and present some preliminary results. This paper shows the possibility to quantitatively evaluate the carbide distribution (size and density) of the carburized surface of a gear, and also shows the potential to repair materials exposed to a high-temperature oxidative atmosphere by Pr-Ir coating technology.

In this study, the Bass Model was utilized to estimate the future diffusion of natural gas vehicles (NGVs), in Japan and other countries. The parameters contained in the model, namely, coefficient of innovation (p), coefficient of imitation (r), and the potential market (N), were extracted from the trend as indicated by the actual diffusion curve up to 2014, after which the ultimate diffusion number was calculated based mainly on these parameters. Firstly, three scenarios were established to analyze the future diffusion of NGVs in Japan, with the highest outcome being 8.5 million, accounting for 14 % of the total vehicles. Secondly, as a feasibility study, the Bass Model was utilized to examine twelve countries where NGVs are popularized. The actual diffusion curve pertaining to Iran, Argentina, India, Brazil, Italy, Columbia, Thailand, Ukraine, and Bolivia could ideally fit the Bass Model curve, while the fit was poor for China, Pakistan, and the United States. The reasons for the poor fit were then explained. Finally, the conditions and requirements to facilitate the highest diffusion number in Japan were discussed.

Developing a reliable forecasting process is a crucial step for optimization of the overall planning process of product remanufacturing. This study examined the effectiveness of demand forecasting in remanufacturing by time series analysis (Holt-Winters model), product lifetime model (Weibull distribution), and incorporation of the two methods. To verify the effectiveness, the actual data of the time series of the sales of remanufactured alternators of an independent remanufacturer was used. For the forecasting over a year, the results provided average errors of 35.3% for Holt-Winters model, 42.2% for Weibull distribution, and 29.3% for the incorporated model. The results indicate the forecasting accuracy can improve by appropriately incorporating different methods. The results, implications, and future steps are discussed.