European process industries face significant challenges in a changing geopolitical landscape, under the threat of climate change and against fierce international competition. In this context, boosting the resilience and competitiveness of process industries, while taking surefooted steps towards climate neutrality is of existential importance. StreamSTEP is the vision of 31 organisations across EU, Switzerland, Norway and UK, aspiring to trigger significant improvements of how heating energy is managed within industrial processes. The project will address processes that generate waste heat across all temperature grades, from 135oC to over 1400oC, deploying five innovative heat exchanger prototypes for challenging applications and achieving flexible operation across multiple heat sinks. Heat upgrade will be managed through high temperature heat pumps, achieving outlet temperatures at 150oC and at 215oC, with improved performance through ejector technology and the capacity to operate dynamically across a range of required temperatures. Enablers of these innovations are advanced manufacturing techniques, achieving superior material performance through novel material alloys. The system will be demonstrated across five sectors: non-ferrous metals, ceramics, minerals, plastics and refining. The demonstrators will be supported by impact boosting resources, de-risking the investment and accelerating commercialisation. A holistic process digital twinning pipeline will be integral to these advancements, as it will provide the infrastructure to deploy powerful optimisation agents, addressing energy balance, intermediary storage, GHG avoidance and data-driven LCA. The effects of the StreamSTEP project will be significant, as the recovery and efficient reutilisation of the majority of waste heat (50%-over 90%) will be achieved, with systems boasting a payback below 3 years, with the added effects of increasing productivity in selected processes, as well as energy flexibility.

Industrial-Urban symbiosis (I-US) involves municipalities and regions cooperating with industries on the management of resources, waste, energy, water, infrastructures, services, transportation and networks. This inter-disciplinary and cross-sectoral character is implemented by Hubs4Circularity (H4C) in a FOAK approach, as key instruments for delivering territorial I-US solutions in Europe by Processes4Planed partnership. Theseus will establish first-of-a-kind H4C in Greece originating from the capital region of Athens/Attica (incl. Athens metropolitan area -Greek capital, 68 municipalities, 2.928 km, 3,7 million inhabitants 35% of national- several industrial and semi-urban areas) towards the whole country, with overarching aim of closing loops through I-US to become climate neutral by 2050, in line with P4P partnership objectives. Theseus will validate new or existing technologies and develop solutions for water, energy and materials based on regional needs (Innovation Pillar (IP) 2 , 3) and digital/robotic technologies (IP4). The hub will operate under innovative governance and cooperation models of involved stakeholders, to enable pilots, upscale solutions, exploit outcomes, attract further companies and expand existing ecosystem (IP1,5). Water, energy and material flows were targeted selected, being widely spread, having high potential all over Europe and included in EU/P4P strategies. The overall systemic, based on regional science approach and IP1,IP5 activities will ensure strong insights to smoothly replicate Theseus solutions to other EU regions. Several existing innovations from H4C, I-US and Circular Cities and Regions Initiative (CCRI) projects will be used, retrofitted and expanded.. The systemic solution of Theseus is expected to have significant impact on the region, while metaphorically recalling the mythical figure of Theseus, king and great reformer of Athens.

CARDIMED will introduce a framework to build Climate Resilience in the Mediterranean biogeographical region, efficiently unifying individual efforts of regions and communities across different countries and continents. This will be achieved by deploying the digital infrastructure to harmonise the data collection and evaluation processes, providing open data to all the actors involved in the Nature-based Solutions (NBS) value chain and integrating crucial functions for Climate Resilience. Among these functions, smart digital tools for citizen participation and capacity building will supplement an ambitious multi-stakeholder engagement strategy, focused on knowledge translation and impact pathways. Furthermore, holistic modelling tools introducing the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) Nexus approach will provide comprehensive knowledge on the complex NBS interfaces, that will decisively contribute to addressing socio-ecological challenges, along with issues of valuation and low-investment rate in NBS. These actions will be implemented across 9 demonstration sites, composed of 10 regions, 20 locations and 28 communities and comprising 47 NBS that directly relate to 83 interventions and supporting units that tackle climate change and circularity challenges. The consolidation of the demonstrating regions and communities will establish the CARDIMED Resilience Alliance, that will function as the vehicle for expanding the network via upscaling the existing sites and adding new ones. The project includes 5 transferability cases, as well as an additional 10 that will be defined during the implementation. Through these actions, the CARDIMED Resilience Alliance will achieve at least 28 regions and 70 communities by 2030, will create 8000 jobs especially in the NBS sector, and will leverage over 450 M€ in climate investment.

As Internet of Things (IoT) and IoT-Edge-Cloud continuum technologies advance, physical environments are becoming increasingly equipped with sensors, fuelling the development of smart space ecosystems. Massive quantities of data produced by IoT devices revolutionize the way such ecosystems operate via the exploitation of AI models/services. This has led to the emergence of the so-called Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) systems. In general, designing techniques to promote robustness, efficiency and continual operation of AIoT systems requires realistic and trustworthy data at scale. However, such data is not always easy to obtain due to the cost of smart space construction, the inconvenience of long-term device tracking, the sensor/knowledge data gaps in diverse scenarios of a smart space, and the restrictions imposed on sensitive data sharing. Furthermore, an efficient AIoT system operation requires trustworthy AI services, as well as novel approaches for speeding up their inference across the IoT-Edge/Cloud continuum. PANDORA aims to devise and implement a comprehensive framework enabling the delivery of trustworthy datasets of smart space ecosystems, as well as the deployment and green operation of AIoT systems in such spaces. PANDORA spans two phases: (1) prior to AIoT system deployment; (2) post AIoT system deployment and operation. Phase 1 proposes and combines a series of novel techniques such as synthetic data generation, quantification of uncertainties, and data summarization for the delivery of trustworthy datasets, as well as explainable AI and domain-informed model training/testing in smart space ecosystems. Phase 2 defines novel AIaaS and CaaS techniques for the robust, explainable, green and continual operation of AIoT systems deployed in such spaces. The trustworthiness and applicability of the PANDORA framework will be tested through five pilot cases hosting AIoT applications in smart buildings, factories and critical infrastructures.

TRINEFLEX is an integrated EII-transformation toolkit following the `X as a service model´. For the end-users (EIIs), TRINEFLEX will function as an end-to-end service managing the plant?s digital lifecycle and the process of transition to flexible and sustainable operation. This process will be enabled by advanced and green data acquisition, Big Data Infrastructures, process analysis, model development and finally Digital Twins with integrated multi-agent decision support systems. TRINEFLEX will be implemented at each of five demonstration sites with unique challenges, from 4 sectors: glass, copper, aluminium and water industries. The implementation will be supported through the integration of transformative technologies (from the energy efficiency, clean energy, sustainable fuels and feedstocks and CCUS sectors), that synergise with the powerful digital solutions to demonstrate flexibility measures towards energy neutrality. Additionally, TRINEFLEX is designed for rapid replicability in these sectors and high transferability in other P4Planet sectors centred on energy flexibility on the short term and industrial symbiosis on the long term. TRINEFLEX will mobilise local stakeholders and communities into new ways of interacting with the energy and process industries: Capacity building, open science, and introducing new forms of sustainable economic activity. Service- and community-based demand/response will be employed to leverage local energy resources, coupled with emphasis on sustainable fuels and feedstocks, accelerating the adoption of industrial-urban symbiosis. 8 large companies, 7 SMEs will work with RTOs and supporting entities to achieve over 8% reduction of energy costs, 18% peak reduction, flexibility cost below 1.2 €/kWh, over 8% energy demand reduction that are projected to yield over 330GWh of energy savings, 45M€ in energy costs and CO2 tax, over 110kt of CO2 averted and over 800 jobs created by 2030. TRINEFLEX private investment is around 4M€.