Efficient integration of logistics and process control stands as a pivotal element for the economic viability and sustainability of future end-to-end factories. The vertical and horizontal networking of machines presents new opportunities for enhancing production control. Within the logistics chain, interlinking holds the potential to enable a fully automated flow of materials, thus, increasing production adaptability and efficiency. This paper proposes a novel approach to realizing a smart goods inward station by integrating a cost-efficient control logic paired with a material-flow-optimized handling of small load carriers. The developed innovative station overcomes sequential first-in-first-out delivery processes by modifying the material flow of small load carriers and parallelizing unload processes from a dynamic queue, which avoids supply bottlenecks and redundant buffers for optimizing the just-in-time supply chain and reducing non-productive times. By the addition of automated guided vehicles, unloading and delivery processes can be fully automated. A comparison with conventional first-in-first-out systems shows that the modernized smart system increases the pick-up rate through parallel removal options and automated processes, which ultimately reduce lead times. Additionally, the station is equipped with sensors and control logics, which are connected to a logistics system via cost-efficient microcontrollers as modular components. Through these components, it becomes feasible to extend existing logistics chains into Industry-4.0-compliant processes. To illustrate the effectiveness of this approach, the integration of a target-actual comparison within the goods inward station is demonstrated by using a microcontroller-based camera system and radio-frequency identification technology to ensure the completeness and end-to-end tracking of the delivered goods. In this way, the material flow can be controlled more economically, and the supply chain can be organized more efficiently.

Digital Product Passports (DPP) have emerged as pivotal tools to enable transparency and traceability across supply-chains and product lifecycles and thus enable a simultaneous transition towards a more digital, sustainable and circular economy. To this end, various DPP initiatives have emerged in recent years in different sectors, jurisdictions and application domains. While certain DPPs will become mandatory, such as the DPP mandated by the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) in the European Union, many other DPPs are currently being adopted voluntarily. While each of these DPP initiatives differs in detail, all DPPs are created with the aim of facilitating product-related information exchange with e.g., supply-chain partners, circular economy value networks, public administrations and/or with consumers. For this reason, the capability to exploit data from any DPP is key to the success of the DPP concept. Semantic interoperability is the ability to share and reuse data in a manner that is independent of a specific information system. Because of the heterogeneity of information systems world-wide, ensuring semantic interoperability both within a DPP system and between DPP systems becomes crucial. Without it, each DPP initiative risks becoming an isolated data silo, thus minimizing the benefits of the DPP concept. This paper first describes the value semantic interoperability delivers in the context of DPPs, and then discusses the possibilities for its achievement.