Currently, economies worldwide are pursuing mostly a linear model of production which leads to massive material losses, dependency on geopolitically instable states and volatile markets for primary resources. A circular economy, on the contrary, seeks to counter this approach to ?preserve the value of utilized resources and materials as long as possible, to use them as frequently as possible, and to produce as little waste as possible. European industry needs solutions to mitigate the barriers for industrial data reusability and facilitate the unlocking of value from data. Joint Industrial Data Exchange Platform is a place where industrial data is fused for interconnecting seemingly different sectors into the collaboration pipeline. It builds upon the principles of Industry 4.0, by adopting a coherent approach for the semantic communication between diverse actors aimed towards direct or indirect contribution to the EU?s climate neutrality goals of 2050. JIDEP is a landing place to any organization which has any kind of data obstacle to be addressed, on its paths towards delivering more sustainable material, product, service, or solution. Within JIDEP, built-in tools are made available for unlocking the value of the data, which can lead to the development of more sustainable solutions, technologies, and materials. JIDEP is also an optimizing continuum, covering the entire product lifecycle and steering it towards circular standards implementation at technological and regulatory levels. Finally, JIDEP is a tool equipped with resilience frameworks for growing organizational and industrial capacities to withstand supply chain disruptions in short-, medium- and long-term clauses. As such, JIDEP ingests industrial data and produces sustainability, resilience, and circularity artifacts for its participants.

The battery, although central to the green transition of road transport, currently suffers from a supply chain that lacks traceability, sustainability, resiliency, and circularity. Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) are essential for battery manufacturing. The explosive growth of electric vehicles, driven by climate neutrality policy objectives, will pressure the CRM supply chain and increase EU dependency on third countries, resulting in decreased competitiveness for EU automotive and battery manufacturers. Implementing the digital battery passport (DBP) concept in the battery value chain could resolve these issues. The main goal of the BASE project is to develop, validate, and implement a working DBP service, as mandated by the “Regulation.” This will be achieved by exploiting data collected through a number of constantly evolving tools and methods, ensuring a transparent, secure, and cost-efficient platform operation, while also catalyzing the growth of circular businesses. BASE will develop transparent methodologies to calculate battery performance and ESGE indicators, ensuring traceability down to the CRM level throughout the entire battery value chain. In the physical domain, this will be achieved through the mass balancing approach. On the data management side, by exploiting distributed ledger technology, BASE will ensure built-in data authenticity verification along the value chain, with no data duplication, avoiding data manipulation, assuring privacy by design, and promoting data interoperability. The DBP will provide up-to-date and accurate data on battery performance indicators, remaining useful life, dismantling, material composition, and safety. This will allow for an increase in the useful service life of batteries and more efficient recycling, which will enhance resource efficiency, reduce waste, and decrease EU dependency on CRMs from third countries. The applicability of the DBP will be demonstrated through four pilot use cases.

As its surroundings changes radically and climate conditions deteriorates, Europe and its Members adapt to these current challenges. To this end and in order to maximise their usability, the EC established a framework of a common policy (EU Security Market study) by categorizing potential technologies per security domain, including Critical Infrastructure (CI) Protection. This trend is indicative for the importance and significancy that the EC gives to these matters. Any potential disruption, either intentional as a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, may risk smooth operations of such structures that may have a severe impact on a local society and its daily activities or well-being. Current advancements in various technologies can be particularly beneficial in CI protection especially when they can provide a timely support without the necessity of a human in the loop. TESTUDO, aligned with the need of a holistic and autonomous security approach in CI protection domain and with the European Commission’s objectives, will utilize advanced unmanned vehicles along with existing equipment to deliver a highly mature platform for continuous monitoring even at harsh environments and remote territories. Tailored to the needs of the domain and targeting to maximize the platform’s autonomy capabilities, TESTUDO intends to incorporate state-of-the-art technologies for detection, prevention and prediction increasing their cognitive capabilities for different types of hazardous events. In addition, optimization techniques will identify the resources needed for the execution of high-level missions contributing to the total autonomy of the deployable system. A multidisciplinary group of technical innovators for AI-based models, CBRN, cyber-security detection, Digital twins and XAI along with the CI-related experts will collaborate to deliver an innovative action and solution to protect various CIs during a long operational period and completely autonomously.