MAster assignment
Digital Twin for Digital Product Passport
Type: Master CS
Period: Start date: as soon as possible
Student: Unassigned
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Background:
Sustainability has become a major concern of the industrial landscape, having consumer demands, regulation and reporting standards, and efficiency and cost as main drivers. To obtain the right level of sustainability, a company needs to be able to assess how sustainable it is. But existing research underlines the lack of formal models and standardization especially around product life cycle information. This hinders the measurement of sustainability, despite the available metrics and measurement tools. The problem is worsened by the often existence of a deficient information infrastructure that fails to serve all phases of the product life cycle. As a result, information exchange at the interfaces between domains and across company borders fails to overcome data silos and the information necessary to properly assess sustainability is therefore often missing or incomplete.
Our preliminary research [1] focused on exploring challenges and opportunities for improving sustainability in manufacturing supply-chain. We delved into theoretical and practical aspects, emphasizing the complexity of manufacturing supply chains in measuring and improving sustainability. Information transparency is crucial for sustainability, and for that, Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are presented as enablers for sustainable manufacturing. DPPs support the maintenance of the needed information about products, including sustainability metrics, such as CO2 footprint, as well as resource and energy consumption. Our investigation involved reviewing literature, analyzing a European manufacturer's current architecture, identifying gaps, and proposing a reference architecture based on our DPP information model. This component-based DPP approach addresses common gaps like data granularity and batch tracking issues. This approach provides an opportunity for manufacturers to address sustainability issues in resource-intensive supply chains while actively reusing legacy infrastructure. Validation is performed through a PoC and expert opinions confirm its effectiveness.
The main limitations and future research were identified as follows. In general, the absence of a Digital Twin and a live and bi-directional connection to legacy infrastructure introduces a relevant constraint since we only covered the development of the digital thread. Further research is required to investigate the challenges in developing a full Digital Twin for the DPP. We have an interest in investigating the role of Environmental Management Systems (EMS) and the role of International Data Spaces (IDS) for DPP. In particular, we have an interest in further investigating on how to (re)use operational ontologies, particularly standardized ones, to address the DPP information requirements.
Master Project assignment:
In this assignment we would like to extend the prior research on how to develop a full Digital Twin for the DPP, where the Digital Twin has a live and bi-directional connection to legacy infrastructure, focusing on:
- What is the role of Environmental Management Systems (EMS) and the role of International Data Spaces (IDS) for DPP?
- How to (re)use operational ontologies, particularly standardized ones, to address the DPP information requirements?
As relevant topics for solution directions:
- How relevant is the Smart Applications REFerence (SAREF) ontology (standardized by ETSI) for DPPs and Digital Twins?
- How relevant are semantic-based APIs that use technologies such as JSON-LD?
References:
- https://essay.utwente.nl/97870/
- Saraiva, L., Silva, P., Castro, A., Ribeiro, C., Moreira, J. (2023). Ontology of Product Provenance for Value Networks. In: Nurcan, S., Opdahl, A.L., Mouratidis, H., Tsohou, A. (eds) Research Challenges in Information Science: Information Science and the Connected World. RCIS 2023. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 476. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33080-3_40