## 4 Technical Solution  
According to the European Environmental Agency (EEA) [18] and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under SDG 12, \"Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns\", the transition towards a circular economy requires fundamental changes to production and consumption systems, going well beyond resource efficiency and recycling waste. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating and managing product circularity from a systemic perspective to empower this shift. This need is clearly highlighted by the EFFRA 2019 vision paper, which calls for \"leaving the factory floor\" and to look at the bigger picture: the manufacturing ecosystem and how co-creation takes place through the different actors involved. In fact, according to a 2018 report from the World Economic Forum [19], Europe leads the world's smartest factories (seven out of nine selected lighthouse factories). This leadership in Industry 4.0 should be now transformed into digital circular process leadership beyond the factory boundaries. Additionally, the DEI Working Group 2 [20], Strengthening Leadership in Digital Technologies and in Digital Industrial Platforms across Value Chains in all Sectors of the Economy, has, in its more recent report (August 2017) and the October 2018 EC workshop on \"Advanced & Interoperable Digital B2B Platforms for Smart Factories and Energy\", clearly highlighted that (1) \"Big Bang\" attempts to launch a new platform for circularity as the preferred solution must be avoided in lighthouse actions; (2) Design should embrace modular software architectures, cross-sectorial workflow automation, and digital twin interoperability; (3) Existing data-driven digital manufacturing platforms should be connected and leveraged through federation under a shared factory 4.0 model that is aligned with  
Figure 3: Manufacturing and service network in a circular framework. and builds upon the RAMI 4.0 (Reference Architecture Model for Industry 4.0) and international open standards (see EFFRA Connected Factories support action); (4) Well-aligned global reference business architectures for a sovereign data economy, such as IDS, and associated open-source reference implementations, such as FIWARE, are highly required for trusted leverage of industrial data value based on the definition and use of common and standardized (converged) APIs and industrial data models should be extensively promoted. As revealed in October 2018 by the UN report on \"Re-thinking production to boost circular economies\", the circular economy is not yet being implemented on a large enough scale or at the required pace. Industry extracts over 84 billion tons of materials per year to meet the functional needs of society. Yet, only 9% of these materials are cycled back into our economies [21]. Moreover, remanufacturing accounts for only ~2% of US production, and only ~1.9% of EU production. As part of the Circular Economy Package, the European Commission hopes to provide 580,000 new jobs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 450 million tons until 2030, and cut costs of 600 billion euros for European companies, which would be around 8% of its annual turnover and 15% of all the material used in the economy should be recovered and re-used, creating new and lasting competitive advantages for Europe. The transition to a circular economy requires better knowledge about the links between products, their underlying business model, and the societal infrastructure and governance determining their life cycle. However, the circular economy's implementation is primarily a problem of information [22]. So far, a key challenge in this circular process lies in effectively generating, collecting, processing, and making available the volume of information about the material composition/production of each product, use patterns, location within the waste system, etc.