Interoperable Digital Product Passports: An Event-Based Approach to Aggregate Production Data to Improve Sustainability and Transparency in the Manufacturing Industry.

The manufacturing industry is increasingly focused on sustainability, requiring greater product transparency to meet sustainability targets. Digital Product Passports (DPPs) have emerged as a potential solution to improve recyclability and inform consumer purchasing decisions. However, there is a lack of methodology and digital representation for building DPPs, which hinders data linkage and sharing. In this paper, we propose an approach based on standardised data models and event sourcing to aggregate production data, using energy consumption as an example. We present a concept that captures and stores process information using event sourcing in Asset Administration Shells (AAS), and evaluate its feasibility through a manufacturing demonstrator. The results show that event-based aggregation facilitates the creation of DPPs, allowing different actors in the value chain to participate in an interoperable way. By leveraging a standardised and interoperable common data space, this approach improves product transparency, promotes recyclability and enables informed consumer choice in line with sustainability goals.