Asset Administration Shell and Graph-based Analysis for Designing Sustainable Products

Sustainability considerations and Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) are increasingly imposed by legal frameworks to reduce emissions and ensure compliance. Initiatives such as the Digital Product Passport aim at uniformly and digitally representing data for transparency and facilitated use throughout the product’s lifecycle. A challenge remains in the heterogeneity of data and formats, as well as in the assessment and comprehension of the environmental indicators by non-domain experts. Focusing on the early design phase, a potential lies in relating product design to potential environmental impact within a semantic representation.In this contribution, we explore the use of the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) during the early design phase to incorporate sustainability criteria and enhance their comprehensibility. We focus on variant generation and management inspired by software product line and by representing the AAS, along with additional domain knowledge, in the form of a knowledge graph. We present an EPD submodel as part of the AAS. Its RDF-based representation allows for property querying for direct comparison across various AAS submodel instances. The concept is demonstrated for the design of a sustainable switchgear.