PiCo2RAEE began as an applied research project aimed at developing a collaborative platform dedicated to giving Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) a second life. The project addresses the current situation, in which product information becomes fragmented throughout the product lifecycle. Between design, use, maintenance, disassembly, and end-of-life, data and knowledge are scattered, making it more difficult to implement concrete processes for reuse, repair, and refurbishment.
The core idea behind the project is precisely to bridge this information gap by creating a digital environment capable of connecting the various stakeholders in the supply chain and tracking the product throughout its entire lifecycle. The platform thus aims to become a shared access point for collecting, updating, and exchanging information, making circular economy models and second-life scenarios more feasible.
For Moku, the challenge lay not only in developing the software, but in transforming an already well-structured theoretical and research framework into a concrete digital product.
The work was structured in two phases, designed to gradually guide the project from the initial vision to the creation of the prototype.
We began with a functional analysis and design phase, which was necessary to bring order to a complex ecosystem composed of different modules, users, and workflows. During this phase, we collected and organized user stories, defined the main user flows, and translated the requirements into wireframes and shared style guidelines. This work allowed us to transform the project’s theoretical framework into a concrete product foundation, clarifying the platform’s structure and the roles of the various stakeholders involved.
The complexity of the project also lay in the variety of users it needed to serve. The platform had to support designers, consumers, maintenance personnel, spare parts suppliers, and waste disposal companies, each with different permissions and responsibilities.
The second phase involved the development of the software prototype. The architecture was designed to be decoupled, with the backend developed in Ruby on Rails and the frontend in Angular. The backend exposes data to the frontend via GraphQL, while the planned infrastructure is hosted on Amazon Web Services. The platform was designed to be accessible from both desktops and tablets.
The process led to the definition and development of a digital ecosystem capable of connecting different stages of the product lifecycle and various stakeholders in the supply chain within a single environment.
The platform is a single web-based environment consisting of three integrated modules. The first is the Design for Disassembly tool, dedicated to disassembly design and designed to support the upload of technical data and the visualization of the disassembly map. The second is the DPP tool, the module responsible for managing the Digital Product Passport—that is, the product’s digital passport—which can be updated throughout its lifecycle and accessed by various stakeholders based on specific roles and permissions. The third is the 2nd Life tool, designed to collect and manage second-life products and components using a model similar to that of a specialized e-commerce platform.
Within this framework, particular attention was dedicated to the Digital Product Passport. The DPP is conceived as a tool to collect, update, and protect product information throughout the entire lifecycle, with security and access control requirements guaranteed through integration with blockchain technology.
The two-phase process allowed us to transform a complex research framework into a prototype digital platform capable of enabling collaboration, traceability, and data exchange in a context with high potential for industrial and environmental innovation.
