Demonstrating the Application of Digital Product Memories in a Carbon Footprint Scenario

The carbon footprint is an environment indicator, which is of special interest not only for assessing and optimizing production and logistic processes, but also for addressing a growing interest of customers in the ecologic characteristics of a product. Its computation and processing are tightly bound to research challenges, such as the capturing and exploration of item-level data, and the aggregation of item-level process instances. In this article, we report about a demonstration system, which aims at illustrating visitors of a technology fair how these challenges can be addressed by means of item-level records created from input obtained via smart labels. In a scenario spanning several steps of a product´s lifecycle, the system enables the creation and exploitation of these records. During each stage, the system combines item-level data with more general information related, e.g., to the product class and the underlying process model - with the ultimate goal not only to support the assessment of an item´s carbon footprint, but also its reduction for future products of the same class.