Modeling the environmental impact of production equipment in an ontology

Abstract

Production equipment is often replaced or disposed of before its end of life, leading to an increase in waste and resource demand and increased cost for the procurement of new machinery. Transitioning to a circular economy is a possible solution to reduce the environmental impact by reusing and reselling production equipment. The adoption of reuse practices, however, requires a common information model documenting environmental data, terms, and descriptions related to the production equipment to assess the environmental impact compared to newly built machines. Existing ontologies, such as the Manufacturing Resource Capability Ontology (MaRCO), provide a structured representation of technical parameters of production equipment, but lack the integration of environmental information. To close this gap, this paper presents a selection of key performance indicators relevant to the environmental assessment of reused and new production equipment, along with an extension of an existing production equipment ontology to include these indicators. The extension is implemented and demonstrated in a use case study. The resulting ontology provides a baseline to reinforce the circularity of production equipment by enabling the assessment of environmental benefits.