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TRACE, Transparent Responsible Advanced Sourcing for Ceramic Ecosystems, is an industrial research and experimental development project building the first national cognitive ecosystem for managing ceramic production inputs: a system capable of representing, interpreting and anticipating the behaviour of raw materials, processes and supply risks across the entire value chain.
FUNDING
Italian Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy – Innovation Agreements programme (Ministerial Decree of 4 September 2025)
PROJECT CODE
F/400113/01-05/X79
DURATION
October 2026 — September 2029 (ongoing)
THE CONTEXT
A world-class industry, a vulnerable supply base
A world-class industry, a vulnerable supply base
The Italian ceramic industry is a global benchmark for technology and product quality. Its supply chain, however, rests largely on imported raw materials: feldspars, clays and strategic minerals sourced from distant markets, exposed to geopolitical instability, logistics bottlenecks and sudden swings in price and availability. The crises of recent years have shown how quickly a well-established supply arrangement can turn into a structural vulnerability for the entire sector.
The paradox is that part of the answer already lies within the country. The georesources of Calabria and Sicily have been documented for decades, yet they remain largely outside industrial supply chains: what is missing is homogeneous data, systematic characterisation and tools to assess their technical, logistical and economic suitability. The same applies to secondary raw materials: mining waste and glass recycling residues with real potential in ceramic bodies currently end up, in part, in landfill.
Upstream lies a knowledge problem. Geological, chemical, logistical and regulatory data exist, but they live in separate silos that do not communicate, within companies and between them. The development of formulations and ceramic bodies still proceeds largely by trial and error, while the European regulatory framework, from the CRM Act to the CSRD with its ESRS standards through to REACH, is evolving at a pace that makes any purely reactive approach inadequate.
Addressing this condition today means changing paradigm: moving from management that corrects after the fact to the capacity to anticipate, in line with Industry 6.0 trajectories and the growing centrality of strategic autonomy on critical raw materials.
Supplies exposed to geopolitical, logistics and market shocks
Georesources in Southern Italy documented yet absent from industrial supply chains
Data across the value chain fragmented into silos that do not communicate with each other
Regulations evolving faster than companies' ability to adapt
THE PROJECT
A Cognitive Mirror for production inputs
A Cognitive Mirror for production inputs
TRACE is developing a Cognitive Mirror of ceramic production inputs: an integrated system that represents and interprets the complexity of materials and processes in the upstream stages of the value chain, from sourcing to the preparation of ceramic bodies. Neither a data repository nor a mere digital twin, but an environment capable of correlating the geological origin of resources, material properties, industrial performance, supply risks and regulatory constraints, and of simulating alternative scenarios before decisions are made.
The approach is not one of IT and management systems: it is materials complexity engineering. Digitalisation is an enabling means; the heart of the project is the construction of physical, semantic and predictive models that reflect the real behaviour of material systems. This is why the project intertwines industrial research and experimental development, taking its solutions from early technology readiness levels through to validation in an operational environment.
01
01
Cognitive transparency
Cognitive transparency
Making national georesources and material flows knowable: mapping and characterisation of deposits in Calabria and Sicily, homogeneous and interoperable datasets, non-destructive measurement systems based on capacitive, ultrasonic and thermographic techniques to read ceramic bodies.
02
02
Risk and resilience
Risk and resilience
Developing predictive models that quantify the supply risk and carbon footprint of incoming materials, turning what are currently manual, static assessments into a dynamic calculation supporting decision-making.
03
03
Cognitive sourcing
Cognitive sourcing
Designing the architecture of the Cognitive Mirror and the AI-design engines guiding the formulation of additives and materials for digital printing, replacing empirical experimentation with predictive design.
04
04
Regenerative materials
Regenerative materials
Valorising mining waste and glass recycling residues in regenerative ceramic bodies, through advanced characterisation, prototyping and progressive validation up to industrial scale.
05
05
Regulatory intelligence
Regulatory intelligence
Translating regulatory evolution into computable relationships: a cognitive model that links regulations, materials, processes and safety requirements, making it possible to simulate the effects of regulatory changes in advance.
The five workstreams do not simply run in parallel: the data generated by transparency feeds the risk models, the models drive the Cognitive Mirror, and the Mirror guides the development of regenerative materials and the reading of regulatory scenarios. It is this integration that makes TRACE a structured, progressive programme rather than a sum of separate activities.
THE JOURNEY
A project in three movements
A project in three movements
TRACE unfolds over 36 months in which research and experimentation feed into each other. The journey can be read as three broad movements, each building on the previous one.
PHASE 1
In progress
Understanding and setting up
Understanding and setting up
Work began with the knowledge foundations. Mapping campaigns of the georesources of Calabria and Sicily are underway, including the survey of extraction sites, field reconnaissance and initial sampling. In parallel, the formal mapping of chemical and mining processes is progressing, making explicit a body of knowledge that until now has been dispersed and unformalised, together with the setup of the cognitive infrastructure: the information model, material-process ontologies and data quality protocols. The collection and classification of regulatory texts that will feed the regulatory intelligence module has also begun.
PHASE 2 Upcoming
Modelling and developing
Modelling and developing
The knowledge gathered will become models. This phase covers the advanced characterisation of materials, laboratory formulations and firing tests, the development of non-destructive measurement systems, the construction of the calculation engines for supply risk and carbon footprint, the AI-design models for additives and digital materials, and the progressive construction and calibration of the Cognitive Mirror and the regulatory predictive models.
PHASE 3 Upcoming
Testing and validating
Testing and validating
The final movement will bring the results into an operational environment: the recovery of glass cullet at industrial scale, pilot and industrial batches of regenerative ceramic bodies, in-plant testing of the deflocculants and digital materials designed with the support of artificial intelligence, the implementation of the Cognitive Mirror in real processes, and the assessment of environmental performance using LCA and ESG metrics.
THE RESULTS
The foundations of a system built to anticipate
The foundations of a system built to anticipate
TRACE is in its early stages and its first results should be read for what they are: partial, evolving and deliberately structural. In a project building a cognitive system, the quality of the foundations determines everything that comes after. This is where the work is currently focused.
300,000
300,000
tonnes of mineral material to be brought to digital characterisation
Five
Five
new mining sites in Southern Italy, at a minimum, to be qualified for the ceramic value chain
30%
30%
minimum secondary raw material content in the regenerative materials to be validated
15%
15%
minimum reduction in the carbon footprint of regenerative materials compared with conventional equivalents
Southern Italy's georesources enter the industrial perimeter
Southern Italy's georesources enter the industrial perimeter
The mapping campaigns in Calabria and Sicily are operational: survey of extraction sites, field reconnaissance, initial sampling and the start of characterisation work. Materials documented for decades but left outside supply chains are beginning to be described with homogeneous, comparable data, the first requirement for assessing their industrial use. It is the shift from known potential to usable knowledge.
Production processes become explicit
Production processes become explicit
The formal mapping of chemical and mineral flows is underway: structured representations of processes, identification of critical nodes, digitalisation of constraints that until now have relied on people's experience. The value is first and foremost organisational: tacit, dispersed knowledge is turned into verifiable models, a necessary condition for any predictive algorithm.
The knowledge architecture takes shape
The knowledge architecture takes shape
The design of the Cognitive Mirror's information model is underway: entities, relationships, material-process ontologies and data quality protocols that will allow geological, chemical, production and regulatory information to speak the same language. Five organisations with different technical languages are building a shared vocabulary; without this step, no integration would be possible.
The regulatory dimension enters the system
The regulatory dimension enters the system
The collection and classification of the regulatory texts relevant to the value chain has begun, from the CRM Act to the CSRD through to REACH, which will feed the regulatory knowledge graph. Regulation ceases to be a compliance obligation to chase after and is treated instead as a structural variable of the production system, to be represented and simulated.
Why these results matter
Why these results matter
Taken individually, they are intermediate outputs. Together, they form the knowledge infrastructure on which the entire project will rest: the georesource datasets will feed the predictive models and the new formulations, the process maps will define the constraints within which the Cognitive Mirror will have to reason, the data architecture will make integration possible, and the regulatory perimeter will allow regulatory scenarios to be simulated. The environmental dimension is also built into the system from the outset: secondary raw materials have been part of the scope of investigation since the start, and sustainability and circularity criteria accompany the characterisation work rather than arriving at the end as a final check.
The trajectory
The trajectory
The targets stated at the outset are not the only indicators of progress. Alongside them, the project will measure the predictive reliability of the Cognitive Mirror on real processes, the ability of recovered glass cullet to replace primary fluxes in ceramic bodies, and the thousands of tonnes of mining waste assessed for industrial use. Every indicator plays the same role: making the distance between where the project stands and where it intends to arrive verifiable, step by step.
The expected value, finally, is not confined to ceramics. The methods and architectures under construction, from the cognitive representation of supply chains to risk models through to the AI-design of formulations, are inherently transferable to other material-intensive manufacturing sectors with complex supply chains, and scalable beyond the sites directly involved in the project.
THE PARTNERSHIP
Five organisations, one value chain
Five organisations, one value chain
TRACE brings together those who extract and valorise raw materials, those who develop process chemistry, those who manufacture ceramics and those who study georesources, materials and models. Not a sum of suppliers, but an ecosystem in which each competence is a condition for the others.
Zschimmer & Schwarz Ceramco coordinates the project and serves as the ceramic specialty chemistry competence centre of an international group. It contributes formulation know-how on deflocculants and materials for digital printing, along with the development of the predictive engines bringing AI-design into chemical design.
Gruppo Ceramiche Gresmalt brings the ceramic industrial context: manufacturing plants, process data and a research and development function integrated into production processes. It is the environment in which the Cognitive Mirror and the regenerative materials will be tested against real operating conditions.
Sibelco Italia, part of a global material solutions group, combines knowledge of extraction processes and mineral raw materials with an established presence in glass recycling in Italy. It brings to the project mineral supply data and experience with secondary raw materials.
Università della Calabria takes part with two complementary departments: the Department of Biology, Ecology and Earth Sciences (DiBEST), which brings expertise in the mineralogical-petrographic and geochemical characterisation of georesources, and the Department of Computer Engineering, Modelling, Electronics and Systems (DIMES), specialising in non-destructive diagnostics, which is responsible for the capacitive, ultrasonic and thermographic measurement systems and the related data processing.
Università degli Studi di Palermo operates through the Department of Earth and Marine Sciences (DiSTeM), which is responsible for the mapping, three-dimensional geological modelling and characterisation of Sicilian georesources together with the predictive models of material flows, and the Centre for Sustainability and Ecological Transition (CSTE), which handles the sustainability and circularity assessments across the life cycle.
THE IMPACT
Towards a value chain that decides ahead of events
Towards a value chain that decides ahead of events
Ahead of the project lies the most demanding part of the journey: turning the knowledge foundations into operational capabilities. In the coming months, work will focus on advanced characterisation, experimental formulations, and the development of the measurement systems and the first calculation engines. These will be followed by the construction and calibration of the Cognitive Mirror, the experimental development of regenerative materials and the industrial validation of the solutions, from deflocculants to digital materials designed with the support of artificial intelligence, through to the implementation of the cognitive system in real processes and the measurement of its environmental performance.
The vision guiding the work is that of a value chain able to decide ahead of events: assessing a raw material before depending on it, a supply risk before it materialises, a regulation before it enters into force, a regenerative material before industrialising it. A value chain in which strategic autonomy is not a slogan but the outcome of structured knowledge, in which the resources of Southern Italy become an active part of the value chain and sustainability is measured, not declared.
TRACE is at the beginning of its journey. What it is building today is not yet visible in products, but it is the precondition for everything to come: a system that learns from the reality of materials in order to anticipate that of markets, regulations and risks.
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