| Abstract | Products in the market, specifically ICT devices, have a significant environmental footprint that needs to be reduced to improve sustainability. Furthermore, the availability of digital product information and its quality, in terms of reliability, integrity, and verifiability, helps different stakeholders make informed decisions to choose and increase the circularity of these products.
The digital product passport is a digital twin for device management that provides detailed and trusted information throughout the product’s lifespan that can comprise multiple use phases and changes. ICT devices have a long lifespan and usually keep a unique chassis hardware identifier while adding or replacing parts over the lifespan as part of product usage and maintenance. Recording proofs about key information and actions on a device (such as registration, reconfiguration, data wipe, repair, transfer, and recycling), supported by attestations and documents, brings accountability and verifiability.
We aim to validate a multi-DLT registry to record verifiable, document-supported proofs for the hardware configuration of ICT devices over a circular lifespan with multiple owners. This registry can rely on different distributed ledgers to record these proofs. The registry has been integrated with the open-source DeviceHub inventory system, which calls the registry API to record proofs. As a result, device identifiers can be looked up to find the digital product passport for each device configuration.
To validate our design and development, we have developed two DLT drivers, one for an Ethereum permissioned PoA network and another for the IOTA DLT with channels. We have run tests to verify the verifiable registry API can be implemented and works correctly in both cases.
We confirm that our DLT-agnostic registry API can complement device inventory services to record verifiable proofs about device milestones. Decentralised identifiers allow cross-checking the proofs retrieved from the registry with the product information details collected from the lookup of inventories from manufacturers, owners, repairers, recyclers, etc. That results in digital product passports that represent a trusted digital twin for each device over its complete lifespan.
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