DaCapo: Digital Tools for a Circular Value Chain

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With the DaCapo project, the European Union aims to develop digital tools and AI-based solutions to support businesses in making their value chains and product life cycles more sustainable, thus promoting the transition towards a circular economy.

DaCapo is a project funded by the Horizon Europe programme and the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). It aims to transform linear value chains by integrating circular economy strategies through innovative digital tools.

Coordinated by the Spanish research center AIMEN, DaCapo brings together a consortium of 15 partners from 10 European countries, including universities, research centers, and industry-leading companies from various sectors.

The project's goal is to develop new digital solutions—such as Digital Twins, Digital Product Passports (DPP), and decision support systems—that help businesses to:

  • improve the sustainability and efficiency of production processes;
  • better manage resources and reduce the use of critical materials;
  • facilitate decision-making throughout the entire product life cycle.

To demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the developed solutions, DaCapo focuses on three strategic production sectors for Europe: aerospace, electronics, and logistics.
 

SUPSI's role

The Institute of Systems and Technologies for Sustainable Production (ISTePS) is participating in the DaCapo project with GRETA, a modular and dynamic platform developed to support sustainable and circular decision-making throughout the entire product life cycle—from design to end-of-life, including the optimization of production processes.

Within the project, GRETA will be integrated into the business layer of the architecture, as a key component of the Decision Support System for the Circular Economy.

Thanks to artificial intelligence algorithms, the platform provides advanced decision support through the following functionalities:

  • Sustainability analysis: environmental (Life Cycle Assessment – LCA), economic (Life Cycle Costing – LCC), and social (Social Life Cycle Assessment – s-LCA).
  • Identification of product and process hotspots—i.e., areas with the greatest environmental impact where intervention is most urgent.
  • Optimization of product and process configurations, balancing sustainability and performance through the Best Customization Advisory module.
  • Support for the decision-making process of involved stakeholders, by visualizing alternative scenarios and providing comparative metrics to foster more informed and conscious choices.

“With GRETA, we offer companies a concrete and dynamic tool for making more informed and sustainable decisions, accelerating the transition towards circular economy models,” says Riccardo Canavesi, scientific collaborator at ISTePS.

The platform will enable companies to go beyond simple assessment, by defining concrete solutions to reduce the environmental impact of their products and processes. Moreover, it will be integrable with other optimization tools, such as the Digital Twin or the Decision Support System for the Circular Economy, allowing for an extended analysis across the entire value chain.

Thus, GRETA emerges as a strategic tool to support companies in transitioning toward more resilient, circular production models—ready to face the environmental and industrial challenges of the future.

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