No abstract

The new Circular Economy System requires an innovative approach to the management of information. The FiberEUse IT platform is a solution that enables the exchange of information among stakeholders that works into and across the glass and carbon fibers value chains, from the design to the end of the circle of life. The IT solution supports companies in scouting new potential market applications and search information about companies, manufacturing processes, and objects. Those objects had been defined “circular entities” and can be products, materials, semi-manufactured objects, wastes, among others. The information available for each circular entity is the one which the company itself wants to share and can propose: description, informative details, technical details, processes adopted to create it, consultancy services used, etc. To obtain this necessary variety, the data model had been structured in a polymorphic way; being able to serve different product histories without the ambition to create a common and classic entity relationship schema but thinking by high level object-oriented design.

The FiberEUse IT platform is a tool that enables the exchange of information among stakeholders working into and crossing the glass and carbon fibers value chains. The list of stakeholders had been identified and is listed into the document. The list of users of the platform is also listed into the document, although it is not fixed. During the collection and analysis of the requirements, the circularity of the approach had been in the core focus. This drove to the identification of solutions able to cover all the different and innovative aspects of a Circular Economy Systemic Innovation. New products, new processes, new materials, new connections, quick and unexpected introductions of innovations, methodological approach, end of waste concept, availability of objects for dismantle, not-standardized parameters, are only some of the aspects arisen analysing deeply the requirements. They have all been approached in the platform which is by definition circular, dynamic, expandable and polymorphic. In the FiberEUse project, the validation activities of the IT platform had adopted an agile approach involving demonstrators during the preliminary phases of analysis, and mock-up creation. An internal technical validation had been completed. The methodology had been adopted and main results are reported in Sect. 5.