Fraunhofer-Institut für Produktionsanlagen und Konstruktionstechnik IPK

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Digital Twins within the Circular Economy: Literature Review and Concept Presentation

2024-03-26 , Mügge, Janine , Seegrün, Anne , Hoyer, Tessa-Katharina , Riedelsheimer, Theresa , Lindow, Kai

Digital twins offer a promising approach to sustainable value creation by providing specific life cycle data and enabling the monitoring and implementation of circular economy strategies throughout the product’s life cycle. By analyzing product, component, and material data, as well as process data, it is possible to create transparency throughout a product’s life cycle, build a data-driven product ecosystem, and establish new business and value creation models, from SMEs to large enterprises. This paper identifies application scenarios, their technological readiness level, and the challenges of digital twins for the circular economy in the manufacturing industry based on a systematic literature review. Gaps such as ensuring a continuous flow of information and taking into account the different levels of digitalization of companies are identified. As a main result, a holistic concept for the scoping of a digital twin for the circular economy is presented. One specific use case for end-of-life decision-making is elaborated upon. It is shown that the circular economy can be supported by digital twin data, especially for the optimal decision on end-of-life vehicles.

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Digital Twin for Circular Economy

2023-05 , Mügge, Janine , Riedelsheimer, Theresa , Lindow, Kai

Digital twins offer a promising approach to sustainable value creation by providing a specific data base for the monitoring and execution of circular economy strategies. By analyzing product, component and material as well as process data, it is possible to create transparency throughout a products lifecycle and address current challenges such as climate change and resource scarcity. The concept of a digital twin for circular economy enables to build a data-driven ecosystem and supports new business and value creation models from SMEs to large enterprises. This paper identifies application scenarios, their technological readiness level and challenges of digital twins for circular economy in the manufacturing industry based on a systematic literature review. As a second result, a generic concept of a digital twin for circular economy is presented.

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Taxonomy for Biological Transformation Principles in the Manufacturing Industry

2023 , Berkhahn, Magda , Kremer, Gerald , Riedelsheimer, Theresa , Lindow, Kai , Stark, Rainer

Industry and research are seeking answers to current demands in industrial value creation, like resilience of production, sufficient product quality and sustainability of products and processes. A novel line of thought, seeking the accomplishment of those is the Biological Transformation (BT). BT describes the interweaving of biological modes of action, materials and organisms with engineering and information sciences. The conflation of disciplines from natural, technical and social sciences yields in a heterogeneous field of activities with ambiguous technical terms. An ascertainment of principles of BT is required to classify yet undifferentiated patterns in nature-based production, facilitating their systematic implementation in aiming for sustained solutions on current challenges. With increasing research in biomimetic, attempts arise to capture nature‑based activities in manufacturing through schematic classifications. Yet, basic semantics representing the effective principles of BT in the manufacturing industry is lacking. The goal of this publication is to introduce a taxonomy of Biological Transformation in manufacturing based on its core principles Bio Inspiration, Bio Integration and Bio Interaction. Within the research project BioFusion 4.0, the taxonomy was developed and applied to classify technology innovations. The paper presents the taxonomy, its development and application in use cases.

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An explorative multiple case study of smart-circular PSS - status quo in industry

2023 , Kruschke, Thomas , Riedelsheimer, Theresa

The business as usual is not yet decoupled from current environmentally damaging value creation. This raises the continuous need for new solutions to allow for the operationalization of R-strategies. One specific approach is the establishment of smart-circular Product-Service-Systems considering all three sustainability strategies – efficiency, consistency and sufficiency – in the entire product lifecycle. Within this multiple case study, 30 existing use cases from different industries, which are already interconnected PSS, were analysed in detail using the following criteria: Level of sustainability reporting, B2B or B2C, product focus, sustainable PSS types, classification of smart PSS elements and the realization of R-strategies subdivided into smart and conventional operationalization. Descriptions in the websites, videos and sustainability reports of the respective PSS providers served as the data source for this multiple case study. In addition, to the authors further data collection, using the replication logic of Yin, seven case studies from the scientific literature dealing with the topic of implementation of PSS were an inspiration and some of the use cases have been used for this paper. To validate the above criteria, 30 PSS providers were contacted, 6 of whom responded and confirmed the assessment. The main results were: Findings of the analysed criteria and future research directions.

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Developing Digital Twins for energy efficiency in the production phase of products

2024 , Wehking, Sebastian , Riedelsheimer, Theresa , Tanrikulu, Cansu , Lindow, Kai

The relevance of digital solutions to enable sustainable value creation, the monitoring and ultimately the reduction of the environmental footprint has increased. New information technologies and increased data availability along a product's lifecycle offer more tools to assess product sustainability than ever before. This paper presents how a Digital Twin needs to be designed to help monitor product-level energy efficiency and how such a Digital Twin can be implemented. State-of-the-art research on Digital Twins and their development, lifecycle assessment, and energy efficiency are introduced. There is a lack of evaluated implementations of methodical DT development in different scenarios, especially for the evaluation of product-level energy efficiency during production. Results of a research project with the focus on the development and implementation of Digital Twins are presented. The use case is set within the scenario of the sequential development of a product simultaneously with the development of the Digital Twin. The focus is put on the implementation of an energy consumption prediction and product carbon footprint analytics module as part of the Digital Twin. The development approach is presented and recommendations for the development of future Digital Twins are derived.

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End-of-life decision support to enable circular economy in the automotive industry based on digital twin data

2023 , Mügge, Janine , Hahn, Inka Rebekka , Riedelsheimer, Theresa , Chatzis, Johannes , Boes, Joachim

With the EU Green Deal and the UN Sustainable Developments Goals, the vision of a greenhouse gas-neutral and resource-efficient economy is already firmly anchored in world politics. In this context, the automotive industry faces many challenges including the increasing scarcity of natural resources, a rising demand in terms of sustainable vehicle design, production and materials sourcing. Due to all this, end-of-life decisions regarding dismantling have become increasingly important. A high proportion of secondary materials will be required in the vehicles of the future. To response to these challenges, companies have turned their focus towards the circular economy as a central approach to close material loops. In the German research project “Catena-X” a new data ecosystem with digital twins is one enabler that is being developed. The digital twins represent a promising approach to the circular economy by ensuring transparent, product-specific and end-to-end data exchange throughout the entire product lifecycle, from the material sourcing to the eventual dismantling and recycling. As one particular and unique solution, a decision framework that facilitates the best circular strategy at the end of a vehicle's life is developed and presented in this paper. The underlying data-driven decision support framework is based on circular economy KPIs. This includes material, components and specific vehicle KPIs to best identify the most suitable circular strategy. The framework was methodologically developed by an interdisciplinary team of partners, who are stakeholders throughout the value chain and participants in the Catena-X project. An integrated approach of user-centered design, an adapted version of the V-model and the Scaled Agile Framework were used for the methodology in the development of the solution. The paper presents the concept of a digital twin for a decision support system, that includes a central decision logic that also includes the relevant KPIs and a survey for evaluating the decision logic utilised with a chosen dismantling company.

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Project-Based Learning in Engineering Education – Developing Digital Twins in a Case Study

2023 , Hagedorn, Lisa , Riedelsheimer, Theresa , Stark, Rainer

The current engineering environment demands for an increasing level of interdisciplinarity, innovation, creativity and cross-domain thinking as well as the consideration of sustainability aspects. New concepts, such as Digital Twins and complex product systems lead to the need for integrated product development approaches and new methods that put the user perspective in focus. This also needs to be an integral part in today's teaching concepts of the next generation of engineers.At the Department of Industrial Information Technology of the Technical University of Berlin, a case study was conducted by applying a concept of project-based learning in the engineering domain to address these challenges. In this paper, the case study as well as the method and its validation are presented. Students from different engineering disciplines had the task of developing virtual and physical prototypes for a sustainable, complex product system with a digital twin and respective sustainable business models. Within a structured survey, the teaching concept and the applied method were validated and lessons learned as well as further improvement measures are derived.

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Sustainable product lifecycle management with Digital Twins: A systematic literature review

2023-07 , Seegrün, Anne , Kruschke, Thomas , Mügge, Janine , Hardinghaus, Louis , Knauf, Tobias , Riedelsheimer, Theresa , Lindow, Kai

A Digital Twin (DT) is a virtual replica of a product or product-service system, which can be used to provide transparency of a product's sustainability and to positively influence the ecological impact throughout its lifecycle by means of intelligent data analytics. This paper identifies current sustainability-focused application scenarios of DTs in the manufacturing industry and outlines the results of a systematic literature review (SLR). The identification of the state-of-the-art and the assessment of current DT concepts with regard to the addressed product lifecycle phases, technological maturity and sustainability scope point towards key directions to guide future research.

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Considering LCA in System Architectures of Smart-Circular PSS

2023 , Kruschke, Thomas , Riedelsheimer, Theresa , Lindow, Kai

The realization of smart-circular Product-Service Systems has theoretically promising advantages compared to traditional products. Nevertheless, the sustainability improvement, especially for the ecological dimension is not yet satisfactorily proved. In this paper, the authors examined the current state of research within a systematic literature review with a specific focus on the overlap of the topics: Life Cycle Assessment, Model-Based Systems Engineering, Product-Service Systems, and Circular Economy. The aim is to analyze the potential of a proactive quantification of the ecological impact in an early stage during the development of smart-circular PSS - the system architecture definition. As a result of the systematic review, 27 relevant papers were identified and analyzed and the findings are presented in a structured way. The main finding is that the current state of the art in this research field still is in the conceptualization stage. In addition, a proactive approach is rare and circularity is not considered to its fullest. Quantified use cases do not draw the system boundaries Cradle-to-Cradle and not every of the 9R-strategies is considered. Furthermore, the potentials and challenges of the revealed research gap are summarized.

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Dimensions of Industrial Openness - Understanding Openness and its Implications for Sustainable Transformation

2023 , Weiher, Nils , Riedelsheimer, Theresa , Lindow, Kai

The topic of Openness is of growing importance for industry, especially in Europe. However, the term Openness is used very differently. Openness includes several concepts, including Open Source Hardware, Open Source Software, Open Data, Open Standards, Open Innovation, Open Science and Open Education. The concepts address different dimensions of Openness, all based on some kind of participation and with the goal to create more transparency and accessibility. This article defines the concepts and provides a basic understanding of their importance for industry and for greater sustainability.

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