Moving towards the optimization of industrial plastic production thanks to the OPITRADE project

The CiTD and Elliot Cloud companies, with the support of the Smart City Cluster, are currently in the final stages of the development of the project "Optimization of Industrial Processes through the Decentralized Traceability Application (OPITRADE)".

Plastic is a material used intensively in the industry whose use has become an environmental problem that is affected by many national and international policies. Optimizing its management is, therefore, essential when it comes to reducing its waste and the amount of it that ends up having to be recycled due to errors and malfunctions in industrial processes.

In this sense, the OPITRADE project aims to integrate several technologies to monitor and manage the circular economy of plastic at the level of equipment and production process, allowing to analyze related processes, optimize them and even in future applications to favor the predictive and preventive maintenance of the production chain.

While, in plastic recycling processes, knowledge-based systems are normally based on expert systems, recommendation systems or case-based Reasoning, in the studies carried out in this project, the objective of the simulation has not been the control of the industrial process, but the simulation of it to develop possible intelligent improvements, both in the process itself and in the energy and economic frameworks that can produce a profit from Thanks to this, a generalized procedure has been obtained that has made it possible to define a methodology applicable to other production processes in the industrial sector.

The project was approved within the Digital Technology Projects line of the Call for Aid to Innovative Business Groups 2022 (AEI) promoted by the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce of the Government of Spain.