Throughout product lifecycles, from production, installation and servicing to treatment at end-of-first-use or end-of-life, information can be collected and exchanged between stakeholders. This supports the optimisation of existing practices and enables circular business models such as parts harvesting and remanufacturing. However, establishing such schemes is challenging because the required data, as well as the tools and interfaces used to collect it, vary widely by product category and by the stage and actor in the value chain. To address this challenge, an agile Digital Product Passport (DPP) is presented that is configurable, with properties defined in easily adaptable templates, workflows governed and updated in line with business innovations and the product category, and interfaces connecting users and machines through versioned API endpoints. The SUDE platform is evaluated in a pilot, where the outcomes of disassembling 45 decommissioned e-bike batteries to harvest donor components are recorded. In another pilot in a retail servicing context, a WhatsApp interface connects to the platform via an API that extracts product attributes from images of product labels using OCR. These cases show how agile DPPs enable traceability across diverse contexts while remaining adaptable to business innovations and evolving regulations.
Sterkens et al. (Thu,) studied this question.