CE-PASS is an Austrian industrial research project addressing the issue of sustainability-aware automotive design for the Circular Economy. Austria has a strong industrial base in the automotive sector and this sector is currently undergoing radical change:
Firstly, the sector changes in terms of technology by moving away from the internal combustion engine and its reliance on fossil fuels, to competing powertrain systems such as hydrogen fuel cells and/or battery-based electric drive trains.
Secondly, corporate due diligence increasingly dictates a view on industrial design that bears long-term sustainability and value retention in mind. At the same time, networks-based, cloud-enabled, distributed ICT has brought disruptive potential to all sectors, leading to a new wave of automation and digitally driven manufacturing processes.
Nowadays, corporate IT systems interact with digital platform-based systems (e.g., in B2B supply chains) and exchange data flows between these systems and governmental databases that keep track of material flows and hazardous substances, and also, to and from, Public Sector Information (PSI) that report on ecological footprints of products. As it already becomes clear, such highly networked systems require high levels of trust and security, but will also have high maintenance cost unless much of the data curation and usage can be automated.
The CE-PASS project is partially funded by the “ICT of the Future” Program of the FFG. https://www.ffg.at/
