The Circular project

The Grenoble researchers involved in this project will focus on resolving issues related to the management and implementation of agile circular industrial systems at the scale of territory with the help of tools such as digital twins and AI for managing value chain data throughout the product lifecycle. They will share their expertise in industrial engineering, integrated design, operations research, robotics, sociology, ergonomics, economics, to be able to make this industrial transition effective. The place of Humans in decision-making and the objective of reducing environmental impacts remains at the heart of the motivation. The interdisciplinarity put in place in this project will allow the consortium to be the first research center to address these questions of the future industry, by considering both technological, digital, environmental and human aspects.

In the context of this applied research, both deductive and inductive approaches will be used. The results will be methodological (support for companies in the transition, formulation of guidelines, etc.), technological (with the pursuit of developments for the use of the cobotics and digital technologies such as AR/VR in production systems) and theoretical (with multidisciplinary synergies). New models of organization and behavior of productive systems and value chains will have to be invented in connection with data sciences and human sciences to feed future decision support tools. Given the current progress of the consortium, our work could also take the form of action research and/or be based on experiments. For this, we will rely on a portfolio of case studies linked to several companies or organizations, mainly from the region, covering different sectors of activity.