We are pleased to announce that iPoint-system gmbh and its subsidiary ifu Hamburg are project partners of the industrial research project DfC-Industry (Design for Circularity - Operationalization in industrial product development) coordinated by the Institute for Industrial Ecology at Pforzheim University (INEC). Together with Robert Bosch GmbH and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH), iPoint is developing and testing digital solution approaches for the design of industrial products in the sense of the circular economy and energy transition as part of the project.
To enable industrial companies to develop resource-efficient and recyclable products, the entire life cycle of products (from raw material extraction and material selection to the end of use) must be known for industrial product development and design processes. Companies can only then automatically evaluate circular economy improvements – such as lifetime extension, reuse, remanufacturing, or recycling – in terms of economic efficiency, climate friendliness, and resource efficiency. This is exactly what the DfC-Industry research project aims to shed light on using different product development projects of Robert Bosch GmbH to develop a set of rules for a Design for Circularity (DfC) that can support circular economy strategies and business models in the product development process. In parallel, the environmental and resource efficiency assessment of products is to be combined with artificial intelligence (AI) methods and ultimately automated. This includes a data and interface concept of a standard software as well as an interaction concept for the integration of the solution approaches into commercially available computer-aided design and development environments.
After a test and validation phase, the solutions designed in DfC-Industry will finally be prepared and further developed in such a way that they will also help other industrial companies to integrate circular economy and resource efficiency approaches into their respective product development processes. iPoint plans to transfer the results of the research project into software and service offerings and also intends to contribute the findings to international standardization processes in the field of circular economy. The dissemination of the findings and solutions from DfC-Industry makes a lasting contribution to the development of recyclable and resource-efficient products in many industry sectors and thus to increasing material and energy efficiency, an indispensable prerequisite for the success of climate protection and sustainability goals.
The entire project is funded for two years by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz) as part of the resource efficiency program in context of the energy transition and is supported by the project promoter Jülich.
Learn more about DfC-Industry here (German).