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.

For the past eight years, cloud manufacturing as a new manufacturing paradigm has attracted a large amount of research interest worldwide. The aim of cloud manufacturing is to deliver on-demand manufacturing services to consumers over the Internet. Scheduling is one of the critical means for achieving the aim of cloud manufacturing. Thus far, about 158 articles have been published on scheduling in cloud manufacturing. However, research on scheduling in cloud manufacturing faces numerous challenges. Thus, there is an urgent need to ascertain the current status and identify issues and challenges to be addressed in the future. Covering articles published on the subject over the past eight years, this article aims to provide a state-of-the-art literature survey on scheduling issues in cloud manufacturing. A detailed statistical analysis of the literature is provided based on the data gathered from the Elsevier’s Scopus abstract and citation database. Typical characteristics of scheduling issues in cloud manufacturing are systematically summarised. A comparative analysis of scheduling issues in cloud manufacturing and other scheduling issues such as cloud computing scheduling, workshop scheduling and supply chain scheduling is also carried out. Finally, future research issues and challenges are identified.

Since the late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has been spread all around the world. The pandemic is a critical challenge to the health and safety of the general public, the medical staff and the medical systems worldwide. It has been globally proposed to utilise robots during the pandemic, to improve the treatment of patients and leverage the load of the medical system. However, there is still a lack of detailed and systematic review of the robotic research for the pandemic, from the technologies’ perspective. Thus a thorough literature survey is conducted in this research and more than 280 publications have been reviewed, with the focus on robotics during the pandemic. The main contribution of this literature survey is to answer two research questions, i.e. 1) what the main research contributions are to combat the pandemic from the robotic technologies’ perspective, and 2) what the promising supporting technologies are needed during and after the pandemic to help and guide future robotics research. The current achievements of robotic technologies are reviewed and discussed in different categories, followed by the identification of the representative work’s technology readiness level. The future research trends and essential technologies are then highlighted, including artificial intelligence, 5 G, big data, wireless sensor network, and human-robot collaboration.