PROSET research project

The research project PROSET (PROSpective assessment of Emerging Technologies) is a cooperation project between the Technical Faculty of the University of Freiburg and the Faculty for Environment and Natural Resources. The basic aim of the project is to quantify the ecological consequences of introducing new technologies (such as additive manufacturing or digitalization) in the manufacturing industry and in the German economic system.

Climate change and other environmental burdens put society and the industrial system under great pressure to change. Business and politics are facing ever greater demands for sustainable development. A key point of this development is the intelligent use of existing and above all future technologies in order to use our finite resources efficiently and in an environmentally friendly manner.
The prerequisite for the selection of technologies that meet these requirements is the development of models that map the complex interrelations between ecosystem and economic system and thus enable a meaningful assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of future development options.

Against this background, PROSET should assess the environmental and business performance of new production technologies from a system perspective. The researchers are working on expanding and linking different model approaches so that all relevant interactions between people, the environment and technology can be taken into account. The aim is to increase the reliability of the models by taking these interactions into account and thus to increase the informative value compared to existing methods, particularly when it comes to the ecological assessment of future technologies. In addition to their research activities, members of the group also teach.