Digital Twins for Real-Time Life Cycle Assessment of Products

The reduction of the global environmental impact has been established as an overall responsibility of our time. In this context, the regulatory requirements, specifically the EU proposal for a new Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and Digital Product Passports, are becoming stricter. Companies that want to place physical goods on the EU market need to prepare for more specific reporting and wider scopes of monitoring their environmental impact. In this context, Digital Twins enable the representation and analysis of data and information of specific assets, e.g., products. This chapter focuses on applying the concept of Digital Twins of products to address the new regulatory requirements and depict an accurate environmental impact of an individual product along its lifecycle. First, the authors present relevant personas and user stories as well as the concept at a technical level, focusing on the underlying functional diagram, system architecture, IT infrastructure, and data modeling. Finally, insights from industrial applications of the concept within the automotive industry and the production of an orthosis with bio-based material are discussed. It is shown that the industrial application still faces challenges with regard to standardized cross-company data exchange as well as the interconnection of heterogeneous IT systems for data provisioning. At the same time, the potential of integrating Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in the creation of Digital Twins for monitoring the environmental impact of an individual asset is emphasized.