Europe is still lacking an efficient systemic multi-level approach that enables a recursive, cost-effective, holistic and integrated application of circular principles to the digital uplifting of factory 4.0 capital investments; addressing issues at product, process, system as well as the entire value-chain levels, integrating best practices from emerging enabling digital technologies and avoid a two speed digital transformation across industries in different sectors. LEVEL-UP will offer a scalable platform covering the overall lifecycle, ranging from the digital twins setup, modernisation actions to diagnose and predict the operation of physical assets, to the refurbishment and remanufacturing activities towards end of life. In-situ repair technologies and the redesign for new upgraded components will be facilitated through virtual simulations for increased performance and lifetime. LEVEL-UP will therefore comprise new hardware and software components interfaced with the current facilities through IoT and data-management platforms, while being orchestrated through eight (8) scalable strategies at component, work-station and shopfloor level. The actions for modernising, upgrading, refurbishing, remanufacturing, and recycling will be structured and formalised into ten (10) special Protocols, linked with an Industrial Digital Thread weaving a seamless digital integration with all actors in the value chain for improved future iterations. LEVEL-UP will be demonstrated in 7 demo sites from different sectors. The impact of LEVEL-UP to the European manufacturing industry, but also the society itself, can be sum-marised in the following (with a horizon of 4 years after project ends): (i) increase of the material and re-source efficiency by 11.5%, (ii) increased reliability by 16% of the equipment in an extended lifetime by 20%, (iii) over 50% increase of the Return on Investment (ROI), (iv) about 810 new jobs created and (v) over 80M EUR ROI for the consortium.

Improving industrial energy efficiency at European Manufacturing level requires the integration of energy data with advanced optimization techniques to guide a company decision making. E2COMATION intends to address the optimization of energy usage, at multiple hierarchical layers of a manufacturing process as well as considering the whole life-cycle perspective across the value chain. To this purpose, it aims at providing a cross-sectorial methodological framework and a modular technological platform to monitor, predict, evaluate impact of the behavior of a factory across energy and the life-cycle assessment dimensions, in order to adapt and optimize dynamically not only its real-time behavior over different time-scales, but also its strategic and sustainable positioning with respect to the complex supply and value chain it belongs to. Its major objectives are: - Holistic analysis of energy-related data streams for production performance forecasting; - Life-cycle conceptual paradigm applied to digital twinning of factory assets; - Factory-level integrated multi-objective optimization architecture; - Modular and scalable automation platform for distributed monitoring and supervision; - Comprehensive simulation environment enhanced with energy and environmental performance; - Energy Aware Planning and Scheduling tool (EAP&S); - Life Cycle Assessment and Costing tool (LCAC) integrated in a company Decision Support System; - Sustainable Computer Aided Process Planning (s-CAPP); - LCA-driven supply chain management (SCM) and business ecosystem. For E2COMATION to be successful, it is fundamental that the effectiveness of its methodological approach and technological framework is proved in complex industrial scenarios, involving several factories of different sectors. This will be achieved by implementing the project platform in 2 completely different value chains, the food and drink one and the woodworking one, with 5 concurrent industrial use-cases.