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With the increasingly visible and severe signs of climate change, the soaring and volatile energy prices and the global supply chains disrupted by the Covid pandemics and political crises around the world, the need for more responsible and circular approaches towards energy and raw materials is even more dire than ever. The silver lining of the situation is, that the combined environmental and economic pressure increases the interest of the manufacturing companies in embracing the circular transition.

For custom fabricators, such a transition can on one hand bring immense benefits, but on the other hand requires overcoming significant technological challenges. Working in a high-mix, low-volume setup means that the production process cannot be optimized once and for all – instead, each order should be planned in a way ensuring allocation to the most energy-efficient machines, using as much of recycled materials and accounting for any generated and potentially reusable scrap.

The POET4POEM project addresses two main challenges of the circularity in high-mix, low-volume manufacturing – optimization of the energy consumption in individual production steps as well as tracking and reusing the generated scrap. Embracing such a circular approach will help the manufacturing companies in reducing the environmental footprint of their operation while also offering economic benefits. In addition, the project assumes a usage of data on the energy, resources and products quality to detect anomalies for predictive maintenance of machines.