iPassPro

The project "Intelligent Product Passport for the Engineering of Circular Products in the Manufacturing Sector," or iPassPro for short, addresses the central challenge that today's engineering processes are mostly geared toward linear product lifecycles. As a result, companies struggle to implement the requirements of a circular economy both technologically and organisationally. A lack of standards, heterogeneous and insufficiently structured data, as well as isolated IT systems, significantly hinder implementation. This gap is addressed by the Intelligent Product Passport, which processes data for specific stakeholder groups and manages it through the Circular Intelligence Hub, an intelligent engineering platform.

At its core, the project investigates the synergies between AI, the Digital Product Passports (DPP) and circular engineering to make value chains more resource-efficient and transparent. By combining AI methods, knowledge graphs, and data space technologies, lifecycle data is semantically linked to identify circular innovation potential early in the engineering phase. This approach ensures regulatory compliance and increases global competitiveness through improved data integration and automation.

The Wuppertal Institute leads the work package, which focuses on the development of a circular engineering process based on a 150 per cent reference model as a guiding framework for iPP-enabled engineering. This includes an analysis of the practical organisational impacts, the derivation of specific implementation implications, and the development of compact guidelines. Based on a cross-case analysis of the pilot projects, design principles and best practices will be developed to serve as a foundation for action and transformation for companies.