Circular economy (CE) aims at reducing value loss and avoiding waste, by circulating products, materials or components before they become waste. Today, lack of support for sharing data in a secure, quality assured, and automated way is one of the main obstacles that industry actors point to when attempting to create new value networks. By using different terminologies and not having explicit definitions of the concepts that appear in data, it is very difficult to create new ecosystems of actors. The project leverages open standards for semantic data interoperability in establishing a shared vocabulary (ontology network) for data documentation, as well as a decentralised digital platform that enables collaboration in a secure and confidential manner, where value chain actors remain in control of their own data. This enables the creation of a digital shadow of the operations of a value network, and adding automated reasoning or other means of automation can in turn facilitates treating the digital network as a digital twin of a circular value chain. The project addresses several open research problems, including the development of ontologies that model a wide range of different materials and products providing both vertical and horizontal interoperability for cross-industry value networks. As well as transdisciplinary research on methods to find, analyse and assess new circular value chain configurations enabled by considering resource, information, value and energy flows as an integral part of the same complex system. Three industry use cases, from radically different industry domains (textiles, electronics, and construction), act as drivers for the research and development activities, as well as test beds for the cross-industry applicability of the results. The developed solutions will allow for automation of planning, management, and execution of circular value networks at a European scale and beyond. The project thereby supports acceleration of the digital and green transitions, automating the discovery and execution of new collaborations in the circular economy.
Impacts of the project will be within both the scientific domain, where a new application field of semantic web technologies is being opened up, as well as further societal, economic and environmental impacts. In the latter cases, by the development of new value networks in the three use case areas, the project has potential to improve circularity and reduce negative environmental impact in these areas, as well as to contribute to the transition towards CE at a broader scale. Accelerating the CE transition in turn, has the potential to reduce negative impact on climate, and increase both sustainability and resilience of European industry.
