Science and industry are working on a new AI solution for product development
The transition to a sustainable economic system represents a key challenge for Germany’s future as an industrial hub – both economically and environmentally. Engineering plays a pivotal role in this process, as crucial decisions regarding repairability, reusability and recyclability are made as early as the product development stage. This means that a viable circular economy must be factored in from the very beginning. Scientists from our ‘Advanced Systems Engineering’ workgroup are therefore working together with other partners from research and industry to develop an intelligent product passport (iPP). The aim is to expand existing concepts of the digital product passport to include semantic, dynamic and AI-supported functions.
The digital product passport creates a framework for providing product-related information throughout the entire life cycle, particularly in the context of the EU Ecodesign Regulation (ESPR). It is understood as a digital container for product-specific information that represents the product’s digital identity. Particularly when combined with data analysis methods and artificial intelligence (AI), the digital product passport offers potential for implementing the circular economy. “The digital product passport creates transparency. The smart product passport makes this information systematically usable for engineering purposes,” explains Dr. Christian Koldewey, senior engineer in our workgroup and project manager for “iPassPro[1]”.
A central element of the new research project is the so-called “Circular Intelligence Hub” (CIH), an engineering platform designed to integrate and link heterogeneous data sources and process them using AI methods. “This enables structured and unstructured data to be converted into decision-relevant knowledge and made accessible to various stakeholders in line with their needs,” explains Leonie Happe, project manager at ‘iPassPro’. In addition, the team is developing a governance architecture that enables secure and legally compliant data exchange within so-called federated data spaces. These are decentralised infrastructures that facilitate secure and sovereign data exchange between multiple parties.
The solutions developed are being tested in three pilot projects. This enables companies to systematically integrate circularity aspects into product development via the smart product passport and to achieve improvements in terms of reparability, reusability and recyclability. Guidelines and best practices are intended to ensure the transferability of these solutions to other companies and sectors.
‘iPassPro’ was launched in February this year and will run until early 2029. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is funding the project with a total of around 4.5 million euros. The research partners are the Fraunhofer Institute for Design Engineering and Mechatronics (IEM, consortium lead) and the Wuppertal Institute. Spherity GmbH and ConWeaver GmbH support the consortium as technology providers. The industrial application partners involved are Wilhelm Böllhoff GmbH & Co. KG, Herbert Kannegiesser GmbH and CP Contech electronic GmbH.
