Achieving a Sustainable Economy with Digital Product Passports
The EU started the CIRPASS project in October 2022 to create a cross-sectorial product data model and DPP for the needs of the circular economy [ 4 ]. The project will propose an open DPP exchange protocol and develop use cases and deployment roadmaps . CIRPASS focuses on value chains in electronics , batteries and textiles .
Smart Factory Web commenced work in 2016 as an approved IIC testbed [ 14 ] under the leadership of Fraunhofer IOSB and Korea Electronics Technology Institute ( KETI ). The testbed has the goal of developing and testing standards and technologies for the flexible adaptation of production capabilities and sharing of resources in a web of Smart Factories to improve order fulfillment and enable new business models . Smart Factory Web has been applied in an ecosystem of R & D projects and has evolved into a service-based system architecture for industrial digital ecosystems , addressing the modeling of factory capabilities and products as well as intelligent information integration and search technology to build federated marketplaces or cooperation platforms , e . g . for Manufacturing as a Service [ 22 , 9 ].
The following chapter describes an excerpt of the Smart Factory Web as applied in Catena-X and describes the base model as well as the management of supply chain sustainability information .
The Smart Factory Web ( SFW ) is a service-based system architecture for industrial digital ecosystems , currently applied for Manufacturing as a Service in Catena-X [ 20 ]. Here SFW supports the extraction , integration , maintenance of and search for supplier / manufacturer information such as production capabilities and products . Moreover , the product information is linked to DPP representations and references . Core services provide access to this information and allow applications to implement user journeys e . g ., marketplaces or supply chain management following the one-up-one-down paradigm as a possible traceability model [ 5 ]. This shows how the SFW can be applied as an infrastructure for DPP registration , search and management as well as information integration .
The core of the Smart Factory Web architecture can be broken down into the Supplier Knowledge Base and services enabling other software to manage and query the knowledge in a secure manner . The Supplier Knowledge Base is the sink of information about suppliers and builds graphs by integrating this information , meaning interlinking data and semantics .
The hosting of DPPs must be clarified to be able to incorporate them into SFW . The data sovereignty and cross-sector availability requirements for the DPPs lead to the assumption that DPPs can be highly distributed . In consequence , the SFW only references DPPs ( Figure 4-1 ) via endpoint descriptions and a unique identifier . Thus , the SFW acts as a product passport registry following the ecodesign regulation [ 7 ]. At the same time , to include DPP information in the reasoning offered by the Supplier Knowledge Base , it is necessary to be able to store copies of specific DPP information , e . g . the product carbon footprint ( PCF ) together with the reference . Thus , the SFW also allows arbitrary properties to be added to the DPP reference ( Section 5.2 ).
Journal of Innovation 29