What’s a defence Digital Product Passport? IOTA 2 provides answers

Under the auspices of the Incubation Forum for Circular Economy in European Defence (IF CEED) managed by the European Defence Agency (EDA), the “IOTA 2” project has led to the definition of the requirements for a defence Digital Product Passport (DPP) for body armour.
Beyond the circular management of body armour vests, the implementation of the DPP concept aims to bring operational benefits by improving traceability, product authentication and stock management. The results of the project were discussed this week in the IF CEED Project Circle “Circular Data”.

Data for circularity - The Digital Product Passport

The DPP is a data sharing system built to support circularity of products, by sharing relevant information in the supply chain; the access is granted on a “need-to-know” basis, avoiding unwanted disclosure. For military equipment, the DPP can also improve interoperability across functions - procurement, maintenance, logistics, etc. - and countries. It consists of several components: a unique persistent identifier for the product, a persistent data carrier (physical marking and/or device), a digital connector between the physical product and the digital place of information on the product and, finally, an IT architecture facilitating the data exchange in a secured way. Depending on the product type, different data can be included in the DPP.

IOTA 2 results

The IOTA 2 project defined the needed contents for the DPP for body armour vests (“product data model”): 74 data attributes were identified with information on roles in the supply chain, level of reporting (model, batch, item), classification and compatibility with existing standards.

The industrial partners that participated in the project also analysed the options for the identification of the body armour vest, by evaluating the relevance of different standards for item unique identification (linking the product to its information) and performing initial tests of marking technologies.

The results of IOTA 2 also produced recommendations on the IT architecture that will be used to manage the data, based on the needs of the Ministries of Defence and defence companies in terms of product lifecycle management. A key prerequisite was to guarantee data security and confidentiality.

From these results, a preliminary cost analysis was performed, based on initial investment and operational costs, as well as benefits and revenues brought by the approach.

What’s next?

The project concluded that using DPP would add many benefits to the defence sector and could build on existing standards for easier adoption.

A follow-on project is foreseen to develop and validate a prototype DPP system. IF CEED stakeholders will continue the discussion on the extension of the concept to other categories of capabilities.

Project partners: +ImpaKT Luxembourg (Luxembourg), FECSA (Spain), Rheinmetall Business Unit Protection Systems (Germany), ELMICRON Dr. Harald Oehlmann GmbH (Germany), Sopra Steria Group (France).