Data and Metering Infrastructure for Sustainable Consumption and Production

This paper defines a framework to construct a distributed information and computation engine to calculate the energy, material and information flow of a consumer product over the two dimensions of lifecycle and supply chain. These two dimensions construct a network in which energy content calculation is performed using hierarchical top-down mapping of energy flow. At the network’s atomic level (representing industrial or business processes), energy consuming activities as well as data requirements at process or activity level are defined. The question of data metering infrastructure as a critical and key component of such energy content calculation is also addressed. Overall, the approach is to relate system information and metrics on multiple scales and levels of complexity and to integrate this input within a dynamic information processing and knowledge generating framework. Data sourcing and metering infrastructure proposed here consists of three classes of metering structure: Physical Metering, Virtual Metering, and Simulated Metering. The applicability of proposed tools and approaches are demonstrated through a case study relevant to a conventional consumer product’s supply chain.