Digital tools to support the engineering of a Circular Economy (Made in Europe Partnership) (RIA) -

Expected Outcome

Projects are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Provide a range of support solutions and innovative digital tools for engineers, technicians and operators on the factory floor, in order to build agile, sustainable and responsive production environment and supply chains, with specific focus on areas such as material saving, repair, refurbishing, re-manufacturing, recycling, and reuse of products and components;
• Reduction of the dependency from imported raw materials or harmful materials for the European manufacturing sector (e.g. by material consumption reduction, material substitution and use of secondary raw materials);
• Define specifications and standards for data, products, and/or business processes, that can be agreed and commonly used by many industrial actors and across different industry sectors; and facilitate industry agreements on circularity and sustainability through increased data exchange among value chain actors and enable the development of new types of businesses;
• Reduce the skills and knowledge gap for the actors involved.

Scope

The focus is on developing new concepts, methods, and digital tools to support further engineering of the industrial processes for recycling, re-manufacturing, refurbishing, and reuse of manufactured products and components. New solutions will enable remanufacturing and high-quality recycling by digitalisation of product and component information throughout the whole product lifecycle, in line with the 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan.

Another challenge that falls within this scope is the human dimension. The support tools need to work with the user, and training, knowledge transfer, cognitive interfaces, as well as acceptance and uptake will be vital in the solutions proposed.

Proposals should cover all of the following aspects:

• Development of innovative concepts, methods, and tools that track and trace the status of relevant manufactured products and components, such as electronic systems and components as well as machine tools, and increase transparency and accountability for these along their lifecycle. Where appropriate, proposals need to be able to link up with manufacturing industrial data spaces platforms, so that circular economy data can be shared with a larger set of organisations;
• Inclusion and handling of real-time production data in analysis software and tools, notably for decision making and control, as well as knowledge management;
• Demonstration of the support tools in at least two different realistic production environments with a clear target of improving quality and sustainability with significant economic value. If applicable, legal obstacles to implementation of the proposed solutions should be identified.

Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination.

Research must build on existing standards or contribute to standardisation. Interoperability for data sharing should be addressed. Additionally, a strategy for skills development should be presented, associating social partners when relevant.

All projects should build on or seek collaboration with existing projects and develop synergies with other relevant European, national or regional initiatives, funding programmes and platforms.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership Made in Europe.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement

Activities are expected to start at TRL 3-4 and achieve TRL 6 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

Social sciences and humanitiesCo-programmed European PartnershipsArtificial IntelligenceDigital Agenda

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