Achieving a Sustainable Economy with Digital Product Passports
• Chapter 6 – Conclusions and outlook
• Chapter 7 – References
• Chapter 8 - Acknowledgements
The primary audience comprises system architects and strategic planners for IT technology in companies involved with supply chain management or achieving sustainability goals for products throughout their lifecycle .
The document is intended to be used by IT system architects and planners who desire a better understanding of the essential requirements and architectural approaches for the implementation of digital product passports and tracking of sustainability in a supply chain network .
The major goals of the DPP are to improve sustainable product production , value creation through circular business models , purchasing decisions through transparency for consumers , transparency regarding legal obligation compliance . They can only be reached when solutions for the following challenges have been established :
• Cross-industrial access to and interpretability of the DPP information .
• Clear ownership of DPP data as well as assured authenticity ( possibly from a recognized issuing authority ) and integrity of that data .
• Availability of a DPP over the whole life-cycle of its product .
• Verifiability of the data in the DPP .
• Compliance with GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation ).
Various approaches 1 address these requirements using blockchains and modern user interfaces . These approaches are only evaluated with use cases for simple source to sink information flows from one party to another and do not support multi domain terminology . Therefore , this might not be sufficient for a cross-sector circular economy and the heterogeneous information sources , as well as the complex information flow and completion of cross-sector information management . Studies for researching this complex information management and integration while meeting the above requirements are needed . In this article , we provide results of such a study focusing on automotive production supply chains which provide the ideal use case domain due to their high complexity and cross-sector nature .
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