CEPI

Code: PID2020-116051RB-I00 Director: Moisès Graells Sobré Funding: Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Spain) Period: September 2021 – August 2024 Repository: CEPI at UPCommons

CEPI addressed the challenges associated with the efficient use of resources and raw materials, including the use of clean, efficient and safe energy, extending the advances already achieved by the team in the AIMS and SHAREBOX projects and emphasising the basic principles of the circular economy: a holistic, non-hierarchical and cross-sectoral point of view.

Starting from the limits imposed by the conservation and transfer laws, the project relied on Process Systems Engineering to identify and promote win-win circular economy opportunities, overcoming the sub-optimal solutions that ad-hoc industrial symbiosis approaches typically produce. Models, methods and tools were developed under three working paradigms:

• Unified approach: holistic tools to harmonise the economic, environmental and social concerns and constraints of the different stakeholders.
• Multi-scale view: integration of operational, tactical and strategic decision levels within a unified and consistent information model.
• Multi-sectoral applicability: adaptability to open systems, independent of specific industrial sectors or scenarios and of the geographic and macroeconomic context.

The resulting platform technology provides robust and reliable real-time information for decision making, addresses sustainability through multi-objective optimisation embedded within decomposition strategies, game theory and metaheuristics, and manages the uncertainty associated with incomplete information. The methods and tools were validated on academic and industrial case studies at large and reduced scale, covering the chemical, petrochemical, waste, water and energy sectors.