A Service-Oriented Sustainability Platform—Basic Considerations to Facilitate a Data-Based Sustainability Management System in Manufacturing Companies

Sustainability is important aspect of management. Public awareness for climate change and other aspects of sustainability (resource efficiency, energy efficiency, and social responsibility) has forced companies to integrate sustainability considerations into their day-to-day management activities and overall enterprise strategy. Historically, economic aspects have been the focus of all management activities and thus controlling mechanisms and management systems have evolved to provide all kinds of data to facilitate management activities and decision-making. Sustainability data, however, is currently not available for management with comparable ease. Therefore, this paper describes a service-oriented hub (EcoHub) to enable a sustainability management system and to facilitate management decision-making based on sustainability data in manufacturing companies. The focus is on data and service requirements of real use cases and the respective requirements for a data system based on the Asset Administration Shell (AAS).