SFB 1574: A Circular Factory for the Perpetual Product

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The SFB "Circular Factory" aims to enable integrated linear and circular production on an industrial scale. Its goal is to turn used products into new product generations, moving closer to the vision of a perpetual product. Innovative economic systems that decouple resource consumption from economic expansion are essential for achieving sustainable economic growth. The traditional linear economic approach of “take-make-use-dispose” is not a long-term solution, and circular production schemes provide an alternative. However, large-scale circular production is challenging for manufacturing companies, as current approaches require manual labour and only take place in small batches, mainly in low-wage countries. To increase the adoption of circular approaches, they must become more economically viable for relevant economic sectors. The eternal utilisation of used product substance may not be practically feasible, but this vision of a perpetual product is comparable to the Total Quality Management goal for "Zero Defects" and defines a clear aspiration. The proposed SFB project will explore scientific questions from various fields, including production science, product development, material science, human factors, robotics, computer science, and knowledge modelling. These questions involve generating new products from unique used products, managing multi-dimensional uncertainties, learning complex problem-solving strategies from humans and transferring them to automated production resources, implementing automation in a highly changeable, autonomous production system, and using uniform semantic modelling and resulting data and information to generate knowledge for decision support. The SFB is divided into three project areas: Area A is responsible for designing, modelling, and controlling the circular factory as a complete system through a highly interconnected product-production-co-design. Area B focuses on capturing and modelling the unique product instance and multimodal capturing of humans in object interactions. Finally, Area C aims to implement the autonomous and changeable production system. The development and setup of the circular factory on a laboratory scale is planned after the first funding period ends.