The market conditions and the regulatory framework for the shipping industry and shipyards are changing profoundly. In response, shipyards need to build up the capacity to assess the environmental footprint of their yard-activities and the ship to inform their stakeholders in a transparent, understandable, comprehensive, and trustworthy way. While the environmental footprint of the operational phase of a ship can be covered sufficiently by existing standards, the non-operational footprint of the shipyard processes and the integrated materials and components remain a black box. It is the ambition of this project to drastically change the as-is situation and to make the impact measurable and thereby drive progress toward circular, zero impact shipping over the full circle of life of a ship. Therefore, CirclesOfLife will develop, test, and validate a general methodology and framework applicable to all European shipyards enabling to close the gaps in assessing the environmental performance of the shipyards and the ships they design, build, maintain, retrofit or recycle. CirclesOfLife will go beyond state of the art by defining a scientifically sound SEPI-methodology and Cradle2Cradle Ship Passport and will test and validate its applicability in day-to-day business of shipyards and suppliers in several use-cases, ranging from new building- to repair-and maintenance- to recycling yards. Moreover, CirclesOfLife follows a clear pathway towards market introduction and societal impact supported by Surfrider and ShipBreaking Platform as independent and trustworthy NGO’s. Based on the described measures, CirclesOfLife pursues to offer a widely accepted standard enabling shipyards, maritime equipment manufacturers, shipping companies, finance institutions and other stakeholders to compare the environmental footprint of ships and shipyards

To maintain world leadership in complex, value-added and highly specialised vessels European shipbuilders must develop tailor-made innovative concepts that are efficient to design and build. Project NAVAIS proposed solution is a platform-based modular product family approach supported by the 3DEXPERIENCE integrated business platform. By sharing components and production across a platform of vessels, higher efficiency in vessel design and flexibility in production networks is achieved. NAVAIS uses system engineering approaches to develop the principles, procedures and a re-use component library for modular design and production and will apply these to develop two platform-based product families: passenger/road ferries and multi-use workboats. For each product family a demonstrator will be developed to TRL9 “digital twin”-level, validated and assessed on low impact environmental performance e.g. discharges to air and water, underwater radiated noise and cost-benefit aspects. The demonstrators are a 400 passengers/120 cars E-ferry and a multi-use workboat equipped for aquaculture activities. A major aspect of the platform-based modular approach is the change in value chain management. The current class approval procedure of engineered-to-order designs will be replaced by a procedure where pre-engineered product modules are approved by class, stored in a re-use library and applied in new vessel modular designs. This transfer from an engineered-to-order business model to an assemble-to-order business model will allow shorter process lead-times, constant quality, reduced design and production costs and better integration of the SME supply chain. Exploitation of results is expected at the end of the project duration. NAVAIS partnership contains 16 partners from 5 EU and 1 associated countries and includes technology providers, technology integrators and technology users. The project duration is 4 years and the required funding is € 6,6 MIO.

EU shipbuilding leading edge relies in the complexity, quality, customization, delivery time and lifecycle services (e.g. in situ maintenance, repair and retrofitting) of the vessels manufactured. However, in the last decade, EU small and medium-sized shipyards (SME) have experienced a competitive drawback in their market segments due to an increase of competition from other global regions that benefits from lower labour costs or higher automation degree. Moreover, SME shipyards must also overcome a major impediment related with capital investment that can overwhelm the part cost for shipbuilding. As a result, current automation solutions based on large monolithic equipment, are not still valid for increasing productivity in SME shipyards. Therefore, shipbuilding, and especially SME shipyards, needs novel cost-effective, reconfigurable, modular and flexible worker-centric methodologies capable of improving worker’s performance and ensuring quality and precision in the execution of the labour-intensive tasks. Mari4_YARD aims the implementation of a portfolio of worker-centric solutions, by relying on novel collaborative robotics and ubiquitous portable solutions, enabling modular, reconfigurable and usable solutions targeting the execution of labour-intensive tasks by preserving industry-specific workers’ knowledge and skills. Moreover, replicability and early-adoption of the portfolio of technologies by other SME-shipyards is ensured through several actions on training, technology assessment, benchmarking… by establishing a pan-European network of Didactic Factories, offering general-purpose testbeds and showrooms, as well as providing upskilling and re-skilling of shipyards workforce. To further maximise the impact, Mari4_YARD plans to use synergies with complementary European and national initiatives, especially those related to MG-3-7-2020. A strategy for collaboration with Mari4_CHAIN and Mari4_PRO proposals, if funded as well, has already been set up.