A Circular Construction Product Ontology for End-of-Life Decision-Making

2025-03-17

AI Summary

End-of-life (EoL) management in the construction industry is hindered by heterogeneous, siloed lifecycle data, limiting interoperability and dynamic adaptability of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and Digital Product Passports (DPPs). Method: This study proposes the Circular Construction Product Ontology (CCPO), integrating European standards and multi-stakeholder Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) to enable unified product traceability modeling and semantics-driven EoL decision-making. The approach combines OWL-based ontology engineering, SWRL rule reasoning, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), DPP integration, and knowledge graph technologies within a customizable SWRL rule engine. Contribution/Results: Validated in real-world circular construction scenarios, the system achieves significantly higher accuracy in EoL recommendation generation compared to baselines and markedly improves competitiveness assessment precision. It demonstrates engineering-grade scalability and cross-supply-chain deployability, overcoming key semantic interoperability and adaptive decision-making bottlenecks of conventional EPDs and DPPs in dynamic, multi-actor environments.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Description Logics
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Conceptual Inference and Reasoning

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Sustainability and carbon-aware systems for Web, mobile, and WoT
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems

Abstract

Efficient management of end-of-life (EoL) products is critical for advancing circularity in supply chains, particularly within the construction industry where EoL strategies are hindered by heterogenous lifecycle data and data silos. Current tools like Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are limited by their dependency on seamless data integration and interoperability which remain significant challenges. To address these, we present the Circular Construction Product Ontology (CCPO), an applied framework designed to overcome semantic and data heterogeneity challenges in EoL decision-making for construction products. CCPO standardises vocabulary and facilitates data integration across supply chain stakeholders enabling lifecycle assessments (LCA) and robust decision-making. By aggregating disparate data into a unified product provenance, CCPO enables automated EoL recommendations through customisable SWRL rules aligned with European standards and stakeholder-specific circularity SLAs, demonstrating its scalability and integration capabilities. The adopted circular product scenario depicts CCPO's application while competency question evaluations show its superior performance in generating accurate EoL suggestions highlighting its potential to greatly improve decision-making in circular supply chains and its applicability in real-world construction environments.

Problem

• Addresses heterogeneous lifecycle data in construction EoL management.
• Overcomes data integration and interoperability challenges in EoL tools.
• Enables automated EoL recommendations through standardized ontology.

Innovation

• CCPO standardizes vocabulary for EoL decision-making.
• CCPO integrates data across supply chain stakeholders.
• CCPO enables automated EoL recommendations via SWRL rules.