New Replacement Policy Considering Environment Sustainability (NRPCES)

Creating a data-driven, ICT-enabled decision-support tool that helps the industry integrate sustainability considerations and optimize the lifespan of production machinery.

Goal

NRPCES will develop an ICT-enabled, data-driven decision-support tool to enable the industry to consider sustainability factors to optimise lifetime of their production machineries. In addition, it aims to develop a real time trend monitoring of carbon footprint of a production plant, considering the whole supply chain and its associated cost-CO2e conversion. This will facilitate the transition from linear to circular economy, and a more effective consumption of the resources, to help SMEs and large enterprises adopting new regulatory requirements to reduce carbon-footprint.

The overall NRPCES project objectives are:

1. The development of ICT-enabled, data-driven, decision-support system that implements a practical economic replacement time model based on high-quality, real cost data and environmental parameters.
   
2. Live monitoring of carbon foot-print emission of production machineries to assess sustainability KPIs and fulfilling regulatory requirements.
   
3. Supporting the long-term transformation from linear to circular economy and more sustainable use of resource.

Project status and results

The project was started in Nov 2023. Itsincludes 7 WPs as shown in following figure. LTU is leading WP1 and WP5 and working packages of 1-4 are activated. At this stage, three use cases have been selected for further analyses addressing project objectives. The first use case is related to railway crossing and we have considered railway wheel set as a second use cases. In addition, we have production machineries use cases leading by Sirris.

Expected Project Outcomes

Outcome 1. Integration of sustainability factors in railway asset operation and maintenance, including rolling stock and infrastructure.
Outcome 2. Benefitting notably by addressing environmental issues in the optimal replacement time of S&Cs and rolling stock assets.
Outcome 3. Carbon footprint analysis, which will provide environmental and economic benefits. Industrial partners will develop their carbon footprint calculation and reporting during the project and make further improvements.
Outcome 4. Development of business models for circular economy proposed in NRPCES
Outcome 5. All partners will better understand the component supply chain on current and future climate change mitigation scenarios.
Outcome 6. Increasing the capacity and availability of transport networks and increasing ride safety and passenger comfortability.
Outcome 7. Evaluation of the dependability performance and monitor the health of machinery to fulfill future market demand.
Outcome 8. Support the long-term transformation from linear to circular economy and more sustainable use of resources.