From Factory Floor to Digital Blueprint: Engineering the CIRCMAN5.0 Use-Case Scenarios
Technical blog post by Xgility Ltd (XGL)
How do you turn the everyday reality of four very different photovoltaic factories into a blueprint that AI engineers, digital twin developers, and data architects can actually build against? That was the challenge at the heart of Task 2.4, which Xgility led from the project’s early months: designing and defining the pilot use-case scenarios that now anchor the entire CIRCMAN5.0 framework.
Four Pilots, Four Lifecycle Phases
CIRCMAN5.0 demonstrates its technologies across four industrial pilot sites, each representing a different stage of the PV product lifecycle: ONYX Solar (Spain) in building-integrated PV design, SUNAGE (Switzerland) in production planning for crystalline silicon modules, ASCA (Germany) in organic PV manufacturing, and SOLITEK (Lithuania) in end-of-life recovery and recycling. Xgility worked with each pilot to capture their target problems as structured use-case scenarios, more than 30 in total, spanning design optimisation, zero-defect manufacturing, and circular material recovery.
A Structured Methodology
Each scenario was developed through co-creation workshops with pilot engineers and refined through a common template: the problem being solved, the actors involved, the data required, the CIRCMAN5.0 tools deployed, and the acceptance criteria that define success. A MoSCoW prioritisation exercise (Must, Should, Could, Won’t) with every pilot then separated essential capabilities from aspirational ones, giving the technical work packages a realistic development roadmap.
Crucially, every use case is mapped to the specific CIRCMAN5.0 Key Exploitable Results that serve it, from the AAS-based Digital Twin and ML-assisted production planning to the LCA-based circularity framework and the Digital Product Passport. To make the interactions concrete, Xgility produced UML sequence diagrams for each lifecycle phase, showing step by step how operators, digital twins, AI services, and passports exchange data in a real production scenario.
Why It Matters
Use-case definition is the connective tissue of any large research project: it is where industrial needs and technological ambition either meet or drift apart. The scenario portfolio now guides development across the consortium, underpins the validation KPIs that the pilots will be measured against, and was showcased in the project’s first public webinar, “Meet the Use Cases”. As CIRCMAN5.0 moves into deployment and validation, these scenarios are the yardstick by which the framework will prove its value on the factory floor.