Deliverable 4.2: Digital Product Memory for Tracing Products Across the Life Cycle

This is a pre-publication of this CircThread project deliverable. The deliverable is still pending formal review and acceptance by the EU project officers active in the H2020 CircThread project.

The task will implement a Digital Object Memory (DOMe) service for storing and updating digital information of the physical product for operationalising use case 1. DOMe presents the product as an object with properties, states, and history of use, for interfacing across the life- cycle with design, manufacturing, in-use, and end-of-use stages. The task builds upon the identified product status and life cycle quantitative information needs defined in T3.1 and T3.2 and building upon the H2020 knowledge base of projects incl. SemPROM, RES-COM, FAR-EDGE (DFKI), and TagItSmart! The design of the DOMe will be assessed in terms of passive (only information retrieval) or active (information storage and/or decision execution) attached to the product. This covers physical information hardware attached to the product (e.g. memory, microsensors, radio modules for web connectivity, energy supply), passive tagging information systems (e.g. QR Codes, Data Matrices), quality degradation of the tagging system over time, and software needs (e.g. memory management, sensor management, user interfaces, security). The design will be compliant with the new EN 45559:2019 standard covering product vehicles of communication and confidentiality levels. Specific attention will be paid to the interface between manufacturing objects and product objects from product-assembly-component relationships, in developing the flexible semantic product memory model on the software side in a semantic language (RDF or OWL). To this end an ontology mapping will be generated for machinery/factory objects to products as represented in ontologies for Machinery Execution Systems (MES), Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) and Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) software on one end, and product information on the other end (CAD/CAM) utilising relevant standards (e.g. ASTM E3012 for environmental process characterisation). This will enable interfacing of the Digital Object Memory with machinery and process specific information (energy use, material use, material waste) both in manufacturing and end of use phases (recycling, disassembly, remanufacturing), to attach such information given that the appropriate APIs are in place (as designed and implemented in T4.3). The task will also evaluate options for persistent storage, and how to manage active updating of the DOMe, as it enters a new life cycle stage. The task will result in the design, technical framework and required vocabularies for the DOMe service.