Using a people-led approach to realise the potential of digital passports
A Case Study conducted with Manufacturing Technology Centre
Case Study Authors:
Alex Morrison (Manufacturing Technology Centre), Dr Claire Palmer, Dr Mey Goh and Dr Ella-Mae Hubbard (Loughborough University)
Context
Digital product passports are being introduced across sectors to improve material traceability for the whole life of e.g. products and materials. The digital passport in this case study is a digital twin* of an electric car battery which contains detailed information about the product's materials, design, manufacturing process, supply chain, maintenance history, usage patterns, and so on. The information provided on the digital passport can enhance transparency across product value chains, such as meeting recycling requirements for electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
Many industry processes still require a human-in-the-loop for tasks such as execution, verification, and supervision. Where digital twins are integrated into human-centric workflows, the user interface and interaction must be carefully designed to present the right information to the relevant user, enabling decision-making, problem-solving, and the diagnosis of unexpected events. Considering how the human interacts with the digital twin, from a people-led perspective, helps to ensure that the digital twin provides the functionality the users would expect from it.
Objective
Key to successful digital passports is ensuring the right information is provided in the right way at the right time for stakeholders throughout the product’s life cycle. MTC is leading research in creating an EV battery digital passport to facilitate regulatory compliance for battery recycling. In this case study we collaborated with MTC to identify and address the needs of the digital passport, developing and validating the people-led approach to identify user requirements. Thus, ensuring the digital passport can provide the right information to different stakeholders throughout the battery’s lifecycle (e.g. manufacturer, regulator, recycler).
Approach
Our people-led approach utilises personas to guide the creation of control task analysis (ConTA) questions. These questions facilitate the capture of the decision-making requirements of the multiple and diverse stakeholders who may need to interact with a digital twin. Personas are brief descriptions of fictional typical characters that might use an application in a similar way, e.g. a line manager and manufacturing engineer. The objective of ConTA is to identify the task and goals needed to achieve a system’s purpose, with the users (people) being the core focus. Prompts and generic questions have been created which may be modified to assist ConTA. The control tasks required for decision-making are displayed in a decision ladder.
The approach created with P-LD, has five distinct steps which involves participation from technology developers and end-users. This can be an iterated process, to ensure completeness. Each step has a well-developed technique at its core, enabling the systematic identification of stakeholders, their tasks and decision-making, to create models of their information exchanges with the digital twin.
Artefacts
Acknowledgement
The work reported in this paper was supported by the Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation, at the University of Bath, University of Nottingham, and Loughborough University. The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Grant EP/V062042/1.
*A Digital Twin consists of a system of systems within which the following components must be present as a minimum: a physical instance, a digital representation of the physical instance and a dynamic data flow of key variables between the physical instance and digital representation. Different levels of digital twin can be observed depending on scope, sophistication and behaviour.