Decentralized digital twins of circular value networks-A position paper

Eva Blomqvist, Mikael Lindecrantz, Fenna Blomsma, Patrick Lambrix, Ben De Meester

Abstract: Circular economy aims at reducing value loss and avoiding waste, by circulating material or product parts 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 circular value networks. Together with using different terminologies and not having explicit definitions of the concepts that appear in data, this makes it very difficult to create new ecosystems of actors in Europe today. A solution to these challenges needs to leverage open standards for semantic data interoperability in establishing a shared vocabulary (ontology network) for data documentation, as well as create a decentralized digital platform that enables collaboration in a secure and confidentiality-preserving manner. This vocabulary can then be used to construct digital twins of circular value networks to further enable open collaboration. Once defined, the blueprints of these digital twins will be reusable as templates and can be reused with a different set of actors, or used within a different industry domain. This vision includes a number of open research problems, including the development of ontologies that need to model a wide range of different materials and products, not only providing vertical interoperability but also horizontal interoperability, for cross-industry value networks. As well as trans disciplinary research on methods to find, analyse and assess new circular value chain configurations, and form their decentralized digital twins. The solutions will allow for automation of planning, management, and execution of circular value networks, at a European scale, and beyond. Thereby supporting the acceleration of the digital and green transitions, automating the discovery and formation of new collaborations in the circular economy.