DMaaST: Supporting the Green Transition of European Manufacturing

As European manufacturing moves towards a more sustainable and competitive future, the green and digital transition has become a central priority. Companies are expected not only to improve efficiency and resilience, but also to reduce environmental impacts, strengthen circularity, and make better long-term decisions. In this context, sustainability can no longer be treated as a separate goal or a reporting exercise. Instead, it must be embedded into the way manufacturing systems are designed, assessed, and improved.

This is where the DMaaST Project makes an important contribution. Through its Smart Manufacturing Assessment Platform, DMaaST supports the development of smarter, more adaptive, and more resilient manufacturing ecosystems. By combining data integration, cognitive Digital Twins, distributed decision support, and sustainability assessment, the project enables manufacturing actors to better understand how industrial decisions affect performance across organisations, processes, and value chains.

Within this framework, HOLOSS plays a key role in leading the sustainability dimension of the project. In close collaboration with the technical partners, and through continuous communication and feedback from the industrial partners, HOLOSS advances sustainability assessment across manufacturing value chains through Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) and Product Life Cycle Analysis (PLCA), evaluating industrial use cases from environmental, economic, and social perspectives using a 4-step methodology based on ISO 14040/14044 standards.

This contribution is especially relevant because sustainable manufacturing requires more than isolated optimisation. Improvements in one stage of production can create unintended impacts elsewhere in the system. A process may appear more efficient locally, while increasing burdens upstream, downstream, or at the end-of-life stage. For this reason, life cycle thinking is essential. By embedding LCSA and PLCA into DMaaST, HOLOSS helps provide a broader and more reliable basis for identifying trade-offs, improving transparency, and guiding more balanced sustainability strategies across manufacturing ecosystems.

A major part of HOLOSS’s work is the integration of life cycle thinking, circularity, and traceability into the DMaaST framework. This includes supporting the development and validation of PLCA approaches, identifying lean production opportunities, and exploring reverse logistics. The close interaction with the project’s industrial partners is particularly important in this process. Continuous feedback from real use cases helps ensure that sustainability methods are not developed in isolation, but are aligned with practical industrial needs, operational realities, and implementation constraints. At the same time, collaboration with the technical partners ensures that sustainability assessment is meaningfully connected with the project’s digital tools and data-driven capabilities. This combination strengthens the overall DMaaST approach and helps turn sustainability from a conceptual ambition into an operational and measurable part of digital manufacturing innovation.

In this way, DMaaST shows how digitalisation and sustainability can work together in practice. The project demonstrates that the green and digital transition is not only about deploying advanced technologies, but also about ensuring that these technologies support better environmental performance, stronger circularity, and more resilient industrial systems. Through its leadership in sustainability assessment, product life cycle intelligence, and circularity, HOLOSS helps ensure that DMaaST’s vision is translated into practical methods that support more transparent, informed, and sustainable manufacturing decisions.

Author: Inês Ponte, Researcher at HOLOSS