Coordination and knowledge sharing across materials development communities (CSA) -

Expected Outcome

• A pathway for accelerating advanced material research in line with strategic innovation markets, in particular for generating reliable data and information and for providing easy access to any interested stakeholder;
• A common knowledge base for researchers and industry increasing collaboration between strategic innovation markets driven by advanced materials;
• Overcoming hurdles with regards to the use of digital tools for improved access to and valorisation of data.

Scope

There is a need to integrate and unify digital and materials competences and resources, including data, ontologies, characterisation and modelling, as well as robotics and machine learning, to accelerate the design, development, production and application of advanced materials with the desired manufacturing processes, properties, durability, and end of life. The lack of integration is a major challenge for the advanced materials design and development serving the innovation markets, including the related value chains.[1]

Such collaboration should be extended to the manufacturing industries and their digital marketplaces so that data and information to design new materials can be shared by all interested stakeholders in a faster way.

Platforms integrating materials data management, modelling, characterisation and harnessing machine learning and automation have the potential to accelerate substantially the design, development and upscaling of new advanced materials by a time factor of 5-10 and decrease the costs associated with innovation chain and market exploitation. The necessary acceleration and cost decrease should be directly beneficial for any subsequent manufacturing process.

Actions are required that ensure synergies and common approaches across strategic innovation markets driven by advanced materials, to capitalise on commonalities and to ensure interoperability and integration of all methodologies. There should be collaboration with existing European and national data spaces and marketplaces on interfaces and metadata, in order to ease the access and improve the (re-) use of materials data.

Proposals should address all of the following activities:

• Establish an inventory of relevant existing collaborative materials data and information systems (platforms, databases and infrastructures) serving strategic innovation markets.
• Network the identified data and information systems and make them accessible and usable for any stakeholder interested in the research, development or deployment of advanced materials research results.
• Establish common methodologies for data acquisition and knowledge generation:
  • Modelling, including data- and physics-based materials modelling
  • Characterisation, including multi-scale, multi-technique, in/on-line
  • Materials synthesis and fabrication technologies including autonomous robotics platforms
  • Machine learning and AI-based methods
• Based on the scope of the strategic innovation markets, and on the methodologies above for acquiring data and generating knowledge, develop a common language for data documentation and exchange on advanced materials and related manufacturing processes through widely agreed vocabularies, taxonomies as well as relevant domain ontologies based on the Industry Commons Ontology Commons EcoSystem (OCES)128 and the Elementary Multiperspective Material Ontology (EMMO)129, covering all relevant methodologies (including modelling and characterisation).
• Demonstrate easy access to reliable data and information/knowledge by connection of identified databases with the ontologies, providing a resource for the materials developers community and for industries. This demonstration should be done with a number of case studies in different areas of application of advanced materials and considering the entire value chain.
• Integrate data and methods for life-cycle assessment and take into account the safe and sustainable by design framework for chemicals and materials.
• Establish a cost overview and a business plan for the sustainability for a digital knowledge sharing system and the supporting coordination network across materials development communities and industries up to 2035 and beyond.
• Establish training schemes to facilitate skills development, reskilling and upskilling in the relevant methodologies, with particular emphasis on digital skills for all interested stakeholders.

Proposals should build on or seek collaboration with existing projects and develop synergies with other relevant European and national initiatives, funding programmes and platforms, in particular with the “Materials 2030 Roadmap” and any follow up actions.[2]

In order to ensure interoperability and coordination of data architectures, projects should in particular exploit synergies with:

• the projects selected on computational modelling on Safe and Sustainable by Design (HORIZON-CL4-2023-RESILIENCE-01-23);
• the Data Spaces support centre funded under the Digital Europe programme,
• projects related to Common European data spaces, in particular on manufacturing.

[1]advanced-materials-2030-manifesto.pdf (europa.eu)

[2]https://www.ami2030.eu/

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