A digital platform for cross-sector collaborative value networks in the circular economy

In recent years there has been a growing interest in Circular Economy (CE), which promises to reduce waste and improve sustainability. The promise of CE is to change the conventional "take-make-dispose"that causes massive waste flows based on the integration of demanufacturing and remanufacturing processes within value chains. This integration requires breaking the "silos"of the circular chain to establish new collaborative and sustainable value networks. The paper introduces a novel digital platform for the CE, which is currently under development in the H2020 DigiPrime project. The platform is destined to facilitate seamless and trusted information exchange across circular actors, while offering a range of value-added services that enable manufacturers, remanufactures, recyclers and other actors to gain insights in the status of recycling and waste management processes. The latter facilitates the implementation of zero waste processes, along with the assessment of the performance of the circular chain. The paper introduces the architecture of the digital platform, along with its data modelling, exchange and data traceability mechanisms. It also presents a CE use case used to validate the platform

The RaRe2 Attempt as a Holistic Platform for Decision Support in Rapidly Changing Process Chains

The trend towards globalization is increasingly being questioned or put under the microscope for social, political, and economic policy reasons. Due to the closely net-worked trade relations unpredictable events like pandemics, natural disasters, technical disruptions of supply chains and political conflicts can have considerable economic and social consequences. However, the central point is the constantly and rapidly changing market conditions to which it is necessary to react, or which must be shaped in order to adequately and successfully counter new technologies or new competitors. Within this paper it is worked out that based on targeted support of decision makers from top management to lower management and of the executing staff, the economic consequences for companies can be lowered with data-driven approaches and furthermore the. The objective of this paper is to help tackling reconfiguration needs via a holistic approach with the human being in the centre. The central hypothesis consists of the fact that with standards and defined methods, data-driven tools such as the digital twin or dedicated software applications for decision support specifically for information-based decisions, it is possible to deal more robustly and resiliently with rapid changes in the business environment. Based on exemplary use cases of automotive and medical technology as well as precision manufacturing of optical components, a holistic ecosystem platform RaRe2 will be developed, which will be disseminated as a reference for innovative software concepts on an industrial scale