A remarkable success for the Institute of Databases and Information Systems (DBIS): A joint venture, comprising partners of seven European countries including DBIS, could convince the European Commission to support a common project addressing the substantial improvement of sustainability data exchange. Within its current research program the European Commission committed to fund the joint venture partners with an amount of 3.5 Million Euros over a period of three years.

Especially in highly developed countries, a sustainable development has emerged as a major social and political issue for several years Usually, people intuitively link sustainability to a responsible consumption of natural resources like oil, gas, and rare earths. However, a sustainable development means to optimally meet the current generation’s needs without constraining future generations’ scope of actions significantly. A famous example is the recent introduction of emissions trading within the European Union. This artificially created market is supposed to exert pressure on companies to reduce the climate-damaging emission of carbon dioxide in order to mitigate climate change and its future implications.

Nonetheless, the availability of qualitative and reliable sustainability data is still considered as the main problem regarding the evaluation of products and services. Due to complex supply chains, such as those ones in the automotive sector, the generation of valid data requires a solid integration of all direct and indirect supply chain participants – a tremendous challenge! Therefore, DBIS and 14 academic as well as industrial partners from seven European countries started their cooperation in February 2012 to significantly facilitate the complex exchange of corporate sustainability data.

A network solution is to be developed by the project partners, efficiently collecting sustainability data of products and services along the supply chain as well as well integrating this data with internal information systems. Furthermore, the management of sustainability data needs to be significantly simplified and thereby, the eco-efficiency of existing products, business processes and services be substantially improved.

The SustainHub project is exclusively sponsored by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission and is scheduled for the period of three years. On behalf of DBIS, Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert, Gregor Grambow and Nicolas Mundbrod take care of the design and implementation of the projects’ technical aspects. If we have aroused your interest and you would like to find out more, feel free to visit the project page on the DBIS website.