Plastic is a material used intensively in industry and its use has become an environmental problem on which many national and international policies have an impact. The optimisation of its management is, therefore, essential in order to reduce 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 analyse the related processes, optimise them and even, in future applications, favour 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 aim of the simulation has not been to control the industrial process, but to simulate it in order to develop possible intelligent improvements, both in the process itself and in the energy and economic frameworks that can produce a benefit from any perspective related to the production process. Thanks to this, a generalised 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 Technologies Projects line of the Call for Aid to Innovative Business Groups 2022 (AEI) promoted by the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade of the Spanish Government.