Veikko Eeva
Lumoin Oy
Veikko Eeva holds a MSc in Software Engineering from Tampere University of Technology. He has worked extensively in supply-chains, logistics and financial systems and contributes actively to various open-source software projects. He's a CEO in a startup aiming to circularize built envinroment and construction.
Material passports are considered to be one of the key enablers of efficiency and resiliency in built environment, turning buildings into material banks and facilitating circular business models. One purported method is improving life cycle analysis by incorporating, amongst other things, technical data sheets, materials safety data sheets, environmental product declarations and bill of materials information. Ideally, material passports would be used from the design of buildings through their construction to demolition and recycling. The passports need to be dynamic in a distributed cyber-physical-social environment where data needs to be updated and linked together by actors with differing technical capabilities over long periods of time. Besides the usual aspects, such as how is data stored, accessed and administered, it is also essential to consider the regulations, privacy, and the fact that over the long time horizon, standards as laws will change and evolve. To date there has been some attempts to define common models or portals to gather material passport data, and further research is done in programs such as EU BAMB 2020.
The problem in the proposals seen so far is that they seem to concentrate on defining detailed models through which data is collected to portals via automation and perhaps digital twins, and then somehow distributed to the interested parties. The people interacting with the built environment are usually excluded from these models, although two-way interaction within the built environment (e.g. land and property use) is arguably important to empower people.
We have examined a possibility to create loosely coupled systems that could bring together the various stakeholders in the cyber-physical-social setting. To address the evolving data models, a promising frame of thought seem to be self-describing, semantic data models, such as JSON-LD that can be federated as needed and transformed to adjacent fields. To solve the distribution problem, we propose data being anchored to public blockchains in a way that will allow using peer-to-peer networks or private company networks while still ensuring the authenticity of the data, and having the possibility to point to the data uniquely. For privacy we propose using modern cryptography, such as zero-knowledge proofs that allow extracting answers to questions without revealing the data. Blockhains are also durable in that once the data is anchored to them, it creates a base of trust even if original businesses or that particular chain ceases to exit. To make the data sharing schemes economically appealing, they could be equipped with appropriate licensing options (cf. music).
Thus far we have conducted small internal demonstrations that aim to show that information can be stored in a way that it is possible to later prove the time it’s been known to the signer of that information. We have benchmarked public participation concepts successfully in hackathons (e.g. 1st place in Future Turku) and explored digital twins with blockchains in an EU consortium project. We have also examined ways to effectively link this kind of data together with new versions of it - in effect, simulating a simplified value-chain. We expect that removing the business risk of losing access to information, and making the information broadly available and linkable between various sources would invite a large number of participants and circular business innovation.
