INSPIRE aims at increasing the competitiveness of European manufacturing which depends on producing differentiated and high added value products in an efficient and sustainable manner, with reduced production costs, increased product quality, minimised time to market and optimized strategies towards resource efficiency. The main focus of this project is the development of innovative business models creating flexible networks through the use of intensified processing that would promote more local production in Europe within the 5 years after the end of this study. The project takes an interesting and valuable approach by bringing together the (downstream) manufacturing (“Factory of the Future”) community with the (upstream) process industry (SPIRE) community, as well as regional industrial clusters (parks) to study required changes of business models in Europe, due to a.o. 1) further integration of these industries in the value chain leading to more flexible and demand driven business operation and 2) increased trends towards resource sharing and optimization across multiple process industries (e.g. through industrial symbiosis within regional contexts such as industrial parks). Special attention will also be given to how this approach would be responding to the needs of SMEs as partners in value chains. Expected outcome of this project would be the description of the current European landscape and link between intensified processing and flexibility, development of innovative business models for different sectors in general, and providing a guideline to measure the performance of such novel models under different scenarios.

Currently most of EU research activities in the area of supply chain has been supported through programmes specifically focusing on some aspects as for example technologies for handling and transportation in ALICE, for internal logistics and production networks in EFFRA, Integrated platforms for implementing new communication paradigms in ICT, platfomrs for industrial symbiosis in SPIRE. The aim of the project is to put in place a cross-sectoral and cross-technological initiative at European level to increase integration between production and distribution proposing research and innovation priorities for the future of supply chain. In particular, the project will develop a Strategic Research Agenda where the effort of different communities like EFFRA, SPIRE, ALICE and other ICT are put together to face important challenges like customization and sustainability. Most important steps of the project will be: (i) Creating a European network where most important stakeholders will be involved reaching a critical mass of people from all targeted industries and scientific domains by mean of direct actions along the whole project life; (ii) Identifying future industrial scenarios for 2050: through the analysis of the socio-economic trends and drivers in the market and their impact on innovation & technology development it will be possible to fix some promising scenarios for the future; (iii) Developing a strategic research agenda and a joint action plan on broader innovation policy issues of common interest. NEXT-NET will be grounded on the analysis of most important European and national roadmaps status of implementation, on identification of the most promising enabling technologies for the future industrial scenarios to develop the research and innovation priorities, on workshops (focus groups, brainstorming sessions, ...) with experts and stakeholders from more that 4 supply chains accross Europe.

Large quantities of waste heat are continuously rejected from industries. Most of this waste energy, however, is of low-quality and is not practical or economical to recover it with current technologies. The Indus3Es project will develop an innovative Absorption Heat Transformer (AHT) for this purpose, focused on low temperature waste heat recovery (below 130ºC). The Indus3Es System will effectively recover and revalorize about 50% of the low-temperature waste heat, increasing quality of the waste source to the required temperature and reusing it again in the industrial process. The main objective is to develop an economically viable solution for industry, appropriate for new but also for existing plants and adaptable to various industrial processes. The developed system will be demonstrated in real environment in Tupras, a petrochemical industry in Turkey, enabling to analyze besides integration aspects, operational and business issues of Indus3Es System. Indus3Es System will be defined and optimized for different specificities in different sectors and industrial processes, for which up-scaling of the demonstrated technology and replication studies will be performed. Market potential evaluation and business analysis will be performed by industrial partners in order to guarantee a successful exploitation of the system in a short future. Indus3Es system will have a relevant impact making possible an energy efficiency increase and primary energy consumption of most energetic intensive industries in Europe. The embodied energy, the environmental footprint of the products and the manufacturing costs of energy intensive industries will be reduced, increasing the competitiveness of European products. Moreover, it will allow a sustainable economic activity for local “auxiliary” companies, usually SMEs, in high added value services related to the energy efficiency measures for industry.

Power electronics is the key technology to control the flow of electrical energy between source and load for a wide variety of applications from the GWs in energy transmission lines, the MWs in datacenters that power the internet to the mWs in mobile phones. Wide band gap semiconductors such as GaN use their capability to operate at higher voltages, temperatures, and switching frequencies with greater efficiencies. The GaNonCMOS project aims to bring GaN power electronic materials, devices and systems to the next level of maturity by providing the most densely integrated materials to date. This development will drive a new generation of densely integrated power electronics and pave the way toward low cost, highly reliable systems for energy intensive applications. This will be realized by integrating GaN power switches with CMOS drivers densely together using different integration schemes from the package level up to the chip level including wafer bonding between GaN on Si(111) and CMOS on Si (100) wafers. This requires the optimization of the GaN materials stack and device layout to enable fabrication of normally-off devices for such low temperature integration processes (max 400oC). In addition, new soft magnetic core materials reaching switching frequencies up to 200 Mhz with ultralow power losses will be developed. This will be assembled with new materials and methods for miniaturised packages to allow GaN devices, modules and systems to operate under maximum speed and energy efficiency. A special focus is on the long term reliability improvements over the full value chain of materials, devices, modules and systems. This is enabled by the choice of consortium partners that cover the entire value chain from universities, research centers, SME’s, large industries and vendors that incorporate the developed technology into practical systems such as datacenters, automotive, aviation and e-mobility bikes

PoSeID-on is aimed at developing a novel Privacy Enhancing Dashboard for personal data protection supporting the pillars of the new EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with regards to digital security, that will be implemented within a single, integrated tool, adopting blockchain and smart contracts technology. It will provide targeted benefits for final end users by enabling data protection by design and by default. In particular, the project will deliver an easily accessible and simple privacy enhancing dashboard useful for monitoring, keeping track record, and controlling all aspects related to data subjects personal data, privacy settings, eventually deciding to authorize/un-authorize personal data transfers. Thus, the primary aim of PoSeID-on is empowering data subjects in having a concise, transparent, intelligible and ease access, as well as tracking, control and management of their personal data processed by public and private organizations, acting as data controllers and/or data providers. They will be able to make conscious decisions on who can process their own data based on data controller trustworthiness, enabling or revoking permissions, asking for definitely remove their personal data or restricting the data to be shared following the data minimisation principle. A risk management framework will be integrated into the privacy enhancing dashboard. As secondary aim, PoSeID-on will support the compliance of technological services and products with the GDPR regarding personal data, by integrating advanced ICT-based tools within a replicable and scalable frame, which can be implemented within a broad spectrum of products and services. Moreover, personal data exchanges across data subjects and different organisations (public & private) or among organizations in case of involved third parties will take place in a secure and privacy-compliant way, generating benefits thanks to the adoption of more streamlined procedures.