Publikation
Integration of Product Circularity Indicators into the Digital Product Passport based on the Asset Administration Shell
Monireh Pourjafarian; Abdullah Farrukh; Mahdi Rezapour; Christiane Plociennik; Martin Ruskowski
In: Procedia Computer Science, Vol. 277, Pages 3297-3306, Elsevier, 2026.
Zusammenfassung
The Circular Economy (CE) is an economic model that shifts from a traditional linear approach to a circular one. It promotes sustainable product development by addressing environmental impacts throughout the entire product lifecycle – from eco-design and production to end-of-life. In order to achieve this goal, it becomes an absolute necessity to measure circularity at different levels, specifically at the product level. Measurement of the product circularity would allow describing the current situation, evaluating possible future achievements, supporting decision-making tasks, and hence directing policy interventions towards required circularity steps. Despite its potential, measuring product circularity faces significant challenges and is a very complex task, including dealing with all parts of the production process and of the product lifecycle, and it often touches intangible measures and business practices that can hinder the achievement of truly sustainable outcomes. This highlights the need for transparent, accessible, and interoperable information through a Digital Product Passport (DPP), enabling relevant data to be extracted and applied across various stakeholders. This paper first introduces a generic approach for modeling a template DPP, grounded in the Industry 4.0 digitalization framework known as the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), designed to support CE objectives. Subsequently, the approach is extended to incorporate Circularity Indicators (CIs) at the product level as integral elements of the DPP. The proposed DPP model is then applied to an industrial use case to demonstrate its practical applicability and benefits.