The article “Servitized Cloud-Based Simulation of Evaporation Plants: Model-Based Design Tools Supporting Circular Bioeconomy” by Claudio Sassanelli, Paolo Greppi, Giorgio Mossa and Sergio Terzi has been published in the IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology book series (IFIPAICT) , volume 664.

This is the result of the fruitful collaboration in the framework of the HUBCAP (Digital Innovation HUBs and Collaborative Platform for Cyber-Physical Systems) European project.

Preprint is available here . Final publication can be downloaded from the journal .

Abstract:

Continuous industrial processes will play a key role for the sustainable transition worldwide. Different flows of matter and energy must be recovered through these systems and integrated in a Circular Economy fashion.

To foster in such a virtuous trend the involvement of companies, mostly SMEs (often lacking critical assets, funds, technologies or knowledge), the continuous processes should be packaged, servitized and marketed as plants-as-a-service.

Model-based design (MBD) tools can provide test before invest and decision support in the feasibility and procurement phases, as well as optimization and self-diagnosing during operation, in a cyber-physical system (CPS) setting.

To ease their provision, a cloud-based collaboration platform, enabling providers to deploy tools in a sandbox, has been developed by the HUBCAP project.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the web application tool built for the evaporation process simulation, validated against real-world performance data for the reference evaporation plant, and deployed to the HUBCAP platform.

To structure it, data collection, filtration, processing, and reporting have been performed on the full-scale pilot plant (the EVAPOSIM experiment), a triple-effect evaporator operating in counterflow and vacuum condition.

To explore the sustainability of their plant, companies can use this MBD tool through the sandbox of the HUBCAP platform under a servitized (use- or result-oriented) business model (software as a service).