Overcoming information asymmetry in the plastics value chain with digital product passports : how decentralised identifiers and verifiable credentials can enable a circular economy for plastics

This paper analyses the potential of digital information technology to enable the reliable provision of product information along the plastics supply chain. The authors investigate the possible contribution of a product passport equipped with decentralised identifiers and verifiable credentials to overcome information deficits and information asymmetry in the circular plastics economy. Through this, high-quality plastics recycling could be enabled on a larger scale than currently possible

Airport Passenger Processing Technology: A Biometric Airport Journey

A passengers’ traveling journey throughout the airport is anything but simple. A passenger goes through numerous hoops and hurdles before safely boarding the aircraft. Many airports today are implementing isolated solutions for passenger processing. Some of these technologies include automated self-service kiosks and bag tag, self-service bag drop-off, along with automated self-service gates for boarding and border control. These solutions can be integrated with biometric systems to enhance passenger handling. This thesis analyzes the current passenger processing technology implemented at airports around the world and their associated challenges that passengers face. A new passenger processing technology called a biometric single token identification (ID) is presented as a solution to help alleviate current issues. By using a medium-sized international airport as a case study, the results show that a single token ID is beneficial to the time it takes to process a passenger. Furthermore, it demonstrates that implementation of a single token ID with self-service technology can provide enhanced passenger travel experience, improving operational process efficiency, all while ensuring safety and security

Materials Democracy: An action plan for realising a redistributed materials economy

Human activities within the industrial economy are now the main and most significant drivers of change to the Earth System. These changes, driven by both the scale of human population and the magnifying effects of human technologies “are multiple, complex, interacting, often exponential in rate and globally significant in magnitude” (Steffen et al. 2004: 81). The years since the 1950s “have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind” (Steffen et al. 2004: 131). Over approximately the same period, the use of manufactured materials has increased by 4 to 15 times (Allwood et al. 2012: 7) and correlates with a rapid rise in global GDP. The expansion of the global economy is directly linked to the rise in land, sea and atmospheric pollution, natural habitat loss and the extraction and consumption of resources. Creating a future free of these destructive patterns will require the abandonment of the ‘take, make and throw away’ culture, moving toward a circular economy in which human wants and needs are met by managing resources at their highest utility for the longest time within biological and technical cycles. Without a wholesale recalibration of the global materials economy to factor in both immediate and long-term implications of all material decisions, inclusive of extraction to processing and transference to recapture, aspirations for a 21st-century circular economy will stall. This paper sets out a proposal for the development of an underlying common architecture and set of protocols for the generation, aggregation, and tracking of materials information in ways that are open, interoperable, and incorruptible. As such, materials information is envisioned as an open web of interconnected databases. The authors propose that such a materials information commons could empower stakeholders at all levels to make more effective decisions. For such an infrastructure to be operable and effective, a concerted and coordinated effort across all scales and sectors would need to be incentivised. This paper lays out the overarching context and need for such an undertaking and highlights both the opportunities and challenges therein. It surveys existing sources of materials information in order to expand upon and characterise recommended criteria for key material, technological, and behavioural functionalities. Lastly, this paper poses a number of areas of focus for future research

Controlling Your Own Story Using a Digital Identity Solution: Creation Of Economic Identity for Financial Inclusion and Protection

An economic identity that we take for granted in many developed countries is often elusive for large segments of the population who are at risks or under political oppression. These segments are often physically located in geographical jurisdiction that are politically unstable and are not connected to conventional banking infrastructure and have little means to access or afford financial services that some of us take for granted. Therefore, in this research proposal, we posit that the starting point of activating one’s digital identity and the subsequent creation of an economy identity is the proper management of the elements of their life stories associated with their identity. We are thus interested in exploring the design principles underlying a digital identity solution (DIS) built on a decentralized blockchain that would bestow upon the individual the affordances to curate, manage, and formulate their life stories through the mechanisms of the narrative persuasion theory for an optimal economic identity

Balancing Privacy and Security in the Australian Passport System

Passports are government-issued identification documents. They provide evidence of identity and citizenship, facilitating international travel and national security measures. This places them at the centre of debates regarding the balance between an individual’s privacy and the security of the community. Understanding the technologies used to implement passport systems can shift the discussion from privacy versus security, towards privacy and security — enhancing both. This article reviews these issues from the perspective of existing laws and future policy-making

Orchestrating a smart circular economy: Guiding principles for digital product passports

In order for firms to implement the Circular Economy, and close all material and energy cycles, connections are needed not only within but also between multiple Industrial Ecosystems. To enable such complex interconnections, the European Union is preparing legislation to enforce the use of digital product passports (DPPs). These are verifiable collections of data about products’ composition, environmental footprint and opportunities for preventing waste. The notion of the DPP relies heavily on a suitable digital infrastructure, and it opens the possibility of using the power of artificial intelligence (AI), to optimize circular production within and between Industrial Ecosystems. The benefits of DPPs will only be attained if their design, knowledge engineering, and implementation is well-orchestrated. The purpose of this paper is to develop a set of guiding principles for the orchestration of DPPs, based upon a trans-disciplinary analysis, that form a theoretical basis upon which future research can build

Building a circular economy: The role of information transfer. EPC Discussion Paper 17 November 2021.

The circular economy is a crucial component of a climate-neutral future. One of the main obstacles to building a circular economy is the lack of information transfer across supply chains. Without any or inadequate access to data about the origin, make-up and design of products, it is impossible for producers, consumers and recyclers to adopt more circular, sustainable practices. Aligning the ongoing green transition and digital transformation carries the potential to overcome this barrier. The EU’s policies for enhancing information transfer across value chains is evolving quickly, as are new technologies. Today, online platforms, databases, apps, sensors, connected machines, QR codes, radio-frequency identification (RFID) and blockchain already make it easier to share data about a product's origin, design, repairability and future life cycle. Digital product passports (DPPs), in particular, show much promise. It is in Europe’s interest to build on the related business cases and opportunities now and create a policy and financial framework that enables the use of these and new digital tools for the benefit of establishing a more circular economy

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications