Enabling the Concept of an Integrated Product Data Model for Life Cycle Engineering by Digital Product Passports

The concept of an Integrated Product Data Model (IPDM) was introduced in the 1990s to enable Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) by connecting and managing product data across all life cycle phases, from design and production to use, service and end-of-life. Although the vision was clear, practical implementation was limited by the lack of adequate technologies for cross-domain data integration, distributed data access, and lifecycle-wide traceability. Today, this situation has changed fundamentally. Technological progress in areas such as decentralized IT architectures, semantic interoperability, cloud-edge infrastructures and IoT-based real-time data acquisition now makes it technically feasible to operationalize the IPDM. At the same time, regulatory frameworks—most notably the EU ESPR (Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation) and EU Battery Regulation —are creating strong momentum for companies to implement data-driven sustainability across value chains. This paper investigates how Digital Product Passport (DPP) systems can serve as a practical, scalable implementation of the IPDM. By linking static and dynamic data across systems, actors and life cycle stages, the DPP becomes an enabler for circularity, compliance, and transparency. Initiatives such as Catena-X and Gaia-X demonstrate within industry-specific use cases how such systems can be implemented today using standardized ontologies, interoperable interfaces and trust mechanisms like identity management. We present a structured analysis of (1) the conceptual development of the IPDM, (2) current technological capabilities for data sharing and system integration and (3) the role of the DPP as a bridging mechanism between regulation, engineering and digital infrastructure. Our findings show that the DPP does not only support documentation and reporting but also opens new possibilities for engineering feedback loops between product usage and development, for smart end-of-life processes and for realization of circular economy mechanisms.