Every manufacturing company generates a continuous stream of operational documents like delivery receipts, energy invoices, fuel purchase records. These documents together hold a detailed picture of the company’s resource consumption, supply chain vulnerabilities and carbon footprint. In practice, this information rarely generates actionable insights for engineers. This project explores how LLM-based text analysis, combined with basic data analysis and modelling, can turn these everyday documents into a useable and useful sustainability decision-making tool for engineers and engineering managers alike.
Working with synthetic and realistic industrial datasets, you will tackle three interdependent challenges. First, material flow analysis: extracting and classifying incoming materials from delivery data, mapping them against EU Critical Raw Material criteria, and computing supply chain vulnerability indices that reflect sourcing geography, adaptive capacity and recyclability. Second, energy and emissions analysis: consolidating electricity, gas, district heat and fuel data into a Scope 1 and 2 fossil-fuel and carbon emission balance. Third, circular economy assessment: developing scoring logic that evaluates whether a company’s procurement patterns support or hinder the transition to more circular, lower-emission production — providing actionable guidance rather than mere reporting.
The project connects to an active research tool under development at IKAT and offers the opportunity to contribute to tools used in industry-facing research. Students with an interest in transition engineering, engineering design, industrial ecology, sustainability engineering or applied LLM are particularly encouraged to apply.
Your formal learning opportunities include:
- Literature research
- Modelling/programming preferably in Python
- Application of LLMs in engineering design
A more detailed outline of your tasks will be developed jointly by you and the supervisor based on your interests and skills.
Contact: Dr. Florian Ahrens, f.ahrens@mb.tu-chemnitz.de