The EU-28 total waste generation in 2014 was 2598M tones, the highest since 2004, 33.5% of which was from the construction sector, being also one of the larger consumers of inorganic raw materials. Construction activities are mainly localized in urban areas where by 2050 about 86% of the developed world is expected to live. CINDERELLA project aims to develop a new Circular Economy Business Model (CEBM) for use of secondary raw materials (SRM) in urban areas, connecting different industries, the construction sector and municipal services, decision makers and the general public with the support of CinderOSS, a “One-Stop-Shop” service, articulated in (i) an on-line ICT platform for tracking and modelling the urban waste-to-product flows, on-line marketing and sharing knowledge and information along the value chain (ii) production and marketing of (SRM) based construction products and (iii) building with SRM based construction products supported by building information modelling (BIM). Different streams of waste will be exploited in the project, i.e. construction and demolition waste, industrial wastes, heavy fraction from municipal solid waste and sewage sludge, mostly of them currently landfilled and/or incinerated. Their suitability for use for building materials will be demonstrated through large scale demonstration activities in Slovenia, Croatia and Spain while the ICT platform will be demonstrated in Slovenia, Croatia, Spain, Poland, Italy and The Netherlands. The project will contribute to 20% reduction of environmental impacts along the value and supply chain, reducing virgin material exploitation and converting wastes to products. Sustainability of CEBM will be proven with the environmental, economic and social assessment through whole life (LCA, LCC and S-LCA). The pre-feasibility analysis of the proposed CEBM indicates an increase of recycling by 30% of CDW, 13% of industrial waste, 100% of heavy fraction and 25% of sewage sludge with a net profit of 18%.

Assets4Rail shares the Shift2Rail view of having an ageing European railway infrastructure that needs to cope with the expected increased traffics in the future. Likewise, reliable rolling stock will be required to crystallize the desired modal shift to rail. Both goals relay on a proactive and cost-effective maintenance and intervention system in the assets. Assets4Rail aims to contribute to this modal shift by exploring, adapting and testing cutting-edge technologies for railway asset monitoring and maintenance. To achieve that, Assets4Rail follows a twofold approach, including infrastructure (tunnel, bridges, track geometry, and safety systems) and vehicles. A dedicated information model (BIM) will be the keystone of the infrastructure part of the project. This model with integrated algorithms will gather and analyze the information collected by specific sensors which will monitor subsurface tunnel defects, fatigue consumption, noise and vibrations of bridges as well as track geometry. On the other hand, train monitoring will include the installation of track-side and underframe imaging automated system to collect data for detecting specific types of defects that have non-negligible impacts on infrastructure. The additional use of the RFID technology will enable the smooth identification of trains and single elements, associated with the identified rolling stock failures. The combination of mentioned real-time collected data with existing data along the implementation of deep learning techniques for assessing large data volumes will pave the way towards a cost-effective and proactive maintenance process of infrastructure and rolling stock. In addition, two innovative intervention methods, noise rail dampers and the cleaning of long tunnel drainage pipes, will be validated on field. Assets4Rail will benefit from a strong multidisciplinary consortium committed to concrete exploitation activities aligned towards the achievement of the challenging project objectives.

The idea is to Build a Knowledge Base, that can be used to trace all activities related to the overall life-cycle of buildings. Since various directives of the EU are related to sustainability, resilience and energy efficiency of building stock, it is necessary to provide a marketplace where various actors can share their offers, including their quality certificates and credentials, and where it would be possible to log and trace every information, activity and change, and use the knowledge to improve sustainability. The project will extend a Digital Building LogBook (DBL), used by a municipality for the management and the administration of its huge set of buildings, with several available and novel data, tools and functionalities, by the help of a Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG), an open source blockchain-based solution. DKG software will include specific building-related ontologies, so that the whole knowledge base about the life-cycle of the building can be logged and by that continuously updated, providing mechanisms and interfaces for the relevant stakeholders, to publish, trace, share, tokenize, end even trade models in a market economy. Such information integration can support decisions on optimal adaptation and intervention planning strategies for large populations of buildings. The DBL will be integrated with several new functionalities demonstrated on a dozen of use cases via easily accessible and publicly available APIs. These functionalities will assure a high interoperability between legacy systems and existing tools (e.g. BIM, HBIM), compliance with standards, providing automated warning and alerting system with the help of machine learning tools, digital twinning, and decision-making support. The new DBL based applications will be tested on pilot projects focusing on historical and critical buildings, and on building stocks. The project targets a smarter and more sustainable built environment of the EU providing new market and new value creation.