Product Carbon Footprint: Digital Product Passport Management and Administration
Especially in Europe, manufacturing enterprises get drilled to develop strategies to create a digital CO2 product passport for produced products. In addition to that comes the necessity of analysis and optimization tools, with a particular focus on circular economy. To achieve this goal, the supply chain is in focus both horizontally and vertically. The horizontal view addresses both the value stream within company boundaries and the entire supply chain. The product carbon footprint (PCF) is primarily determined using data provided by the manufacturing execution system (MES) and the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. These systems are linked via standardized interfaces. Compared to the vertical view, this involves a low level of effort in digitalization. One research question here is to examine the trade-off between the required accuracy and the necessary digitization effort. In the vertical approach, individual processes in the company are analyzed and enabled to calculate a PCF in real-time. For this detailed determination of the PCF at the machine level, extensive monitoring of the corresponding production systems is required, which is why these are equipped with appropriate sensor technology. To determine the PCF, the previously used MES and ERP data are expanded to include machine data in order to implement a cause-based determination of the PCF.
| Category | Data Warehouse & Management |
| Current Version | 1.x |
| Language | English |
| Status | Prototype |
| Authors | Software AG Research team |
In order to assess the practical benefits of the PCF, it is essential to enable an exchange with cooperation partners along the supply chain. Particularly with regard to typical test conditions, the focus is on the verifiability of the elementary function and the benefits and less on comprehensive administration such as rights roles. Accordingly, the aim of a PCF data exchange platform is the simple provision of digital PCF passports and elementary search and analysis functions to provide an overview besides the complete shells. With this objective in mind, in the CliCE-DiPP project we developed a platform for exchanging PCF data as a digital product passport. It is based on the format of the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) as defined by the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA) in the concept of the administration shell of the Industry 4.0 platform.
The PCF data platform consists of a visual interface for the access of human workers and a backend REST service to allow technical systems and machines to upload, filter, and download AAS shells. Therewith the platform is fully operational to embed and test in a real production chain.
