Automated Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) via Asset Administration Shell

Abstract

Due to growing public awareness and rising requirements of legislation and customers' expectations in the field of sustainability, it is increasingly important for enterprises to assess and subsequently reduce their environmental impact. However, the acquisition of environmental data in enterprises still causes considerable effort, due to the necessary manual acquisition. A unified asset administration shell (AAS) potentially provides higher data transparency and environmental data interoperability along the value chain and, thus a more detailed (real-time capable) accounting of the environmental impact of products and services. Hence, this paper presents an approach for an automated environmental impact assessments (EIA) of products and production sites via AAS. Thereby, a first application of the AAS in the context of automated EIAs was implemented at the ARENA2036 research factory. The AAS automatically collects energy and emission data throughout a production process and thus allows the allocation of actual emissions to product and equipment (environmental wallet). The results reveal a first starting point for automated EIA, facilitating individual EIAs to address increasing product variety.