Frank Schultmann

• Dr. rer. pol.
• Director at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

The understanding of sustainability is shifting from that of a purely environmental dimension to one that includes social concerns. Combined with the growing customer interest in livestock husbandry practices, this study investigates the assessment of animal welfare as a socially influenced impact category for the life cycle assessment (LCA) of pig...

This study presents a cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) of pork production in Germany, focusing on pig farming, slaughtering, and processing. The objective is to identify key stages in the production process that contribute most to environmental burdens and explore strategies for mitigation. Seven case studies are analysed, with primary da...

This study quantifies external thermal insulation composite systems (ETICS), in particular expanded polystyrene (EPS) as the insulation layer, installed in Germany between 1969 and 2022. Employing a bottom‐up approach, it conducts mass quantification, localization at the NUTS‐3 level, determination of installation years, and prediction of future wa...

Purpose In crises like natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic, public actors might have to take over responsibility for the population’s supply when the market fails to meet the demand for essential goods. Companies can be valuable collaboration partners for public actors. However, conditions under which companies are willing and able to suppo...

Deep learning (DL) is one of the key tools for analyzing images beyond the visible light spectrum, such as thermal data, for energy-related inspection and fault detection. However, publications using multispectral data focus on developing specialized models to handle quality issues without considering the imagery itself. This paper investigates how...

The circular bioeconomy is an economic approach that merges the sustainable transformation of renewable biological materials into high-value products with circular economy principles. These principles strive to minimize waste, maximize resource efficiency, and establish self-sustaining production and consumption cycles. Circular bioeconomy is an em...

Chemical synthesis offers the possibility to produce different base chemicals and synthetic fuels from various carbon sources. In particular, the formation of synthesis gas from green hydrogen produced through electrolysis using renewable energy and CO2 stemming from sources such as flue gases or direct air capture (DAC) are currently being broadly...

In Chile, forestry and agriculture produce significant amounts of lignocellulosic byproducts, such as forest residues or cereal straw. These biomass resources are currently used to a limited extent for bioenergy, but a significant share is disposed of without utilization, for instance via stubble burning. A major challenge in the recovery of biomas...

The circular economy is an economic system that aims to minimize waste and make the most of resources by keeping products and materials in use for as long as possible. It contrasts with the traditional linear economy, which has a “take-make-dispose” approach. The transition towards a sustainable circular economy requires changes and innovation alon...

District heating systems offer means to transport heat to end-energy users through underground pipelines. When leakages occur, a lack of reliable monitoring makes pinpointing their locations a difficult and costly task for network operators. In recent years, aerial thermography has emerged as a means to find leakages as hot-spots, with several pape...

Concrete relies heavily on cement as a binder, is versatile and has impressive structural properties. Given the significant carbon emissions of cement, the construction industry should strive to minimise or replace its use in concrete. For this, post-demolition concrete can be used as an aggregate substitute and cement substitute. In 2021, Germany’...

Global developments such as climate change, a growing world population and the depletion of fossil resources make the sustainable use of biogenic resources in chemical production inevitable. This would also provide a final product with a higher added value than just utilizing the raw materials for applications in energy generation. In recent years,...

The bioeconomy, a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes biological resources and processes to produce food, energy, and materials, is crucial for achieving sustainable economic development. As we transition to new value chains and technologies, it is essential to investigate bioeconomic solutions to substitute fossil-based production. Advanced m...

The construction sector contributes 36% to global final energy use and 39% to energy-related CO2 emissions. Consequently, it is imperative to focus on quantifying and reducing environmental impacts e.g., via renewable building materials. The combination of fast-growing willow as tension reinforcement for regionally available and compression bearing...

Autoclaved aerated concrete is a popular building material in constructing one- and two-family houses because of its low thermal conductivity and fire resistance. Since autoclaved aerated concrete production rose significantly in the 1960s and 1970s, increasing post-demolition volumes can be expected in the following decades. However, these are cur...

Our paper analyzes the current state of research on artificial intelligence (AI) adoption from a production perspective. We represent a holistic view on the topic which is necessary to get a first understanding of AI in a production-context and to build a comprehensive view on the different dimensions as well as factors influencing its adoption. We...

Establishing the utilization of lignocellulosic biomass in integrated biorefineries can reduce environmental impacts and dependency on imported raw materials by substituting fossil-based products. Whereas energetic biomass utilization is common, chemical utilization is still poorly established, primarily due to the lack of feedstock availability. H...

Effective disaster preparedness, including the strategic stockpiling of resources, is crucial to respond quickly and efficiently to unforeseen crises. Therefore, we contribute to understanding effective disaster preparedness by examining the national food stockpiling practices in Germany and Switzerland, nations renowned for their proactive disaste...

Mycelium-based composites (MBCs) show promising acoustic and thermal insulation, fire safety, and mechanical strength properties and are suitable for multiple applications in the construction, packing or furniture industry. A life cycle assessment confirmed climate change and fossil energy demand benefits in a laboratory scale production modelled f...

Urban Green Space management requires a multi-dimensional, evidence-based approach to effectively balance social, environmental, and economic objectives. City administrators currently lack a data-driven framework for allocating resources during constraint scenarios, leading to subjective decisions. Existing literature lacks objective solutions for...

Chemical recycling of complex plastic waste via pyrolysis can reduce fossil resource dependence of the plastics value chain and greenhouse gas emissions. However, economic viability is crucial for its implementation, especially considering challenging waste streams with high shares of engineering plastics that have lower pyrolysis product quality t...

Cyber threat intelligence on past attacks may help with attack reconstruction and the prediction of the course of an ongoing attack by providing deeper understanding of the tools and attack patterns used by attackers. Therefore, cyber security analysts employ threat intelligence, alert correlations, machine learning, and advanced visualizations in...

The mostly subterranean nature of district heating system pipelines makes pinpointing any occurring leakages a challenge. Airborne thermography offers a means for widespread monitoring, allowing thermal anomalies to be identified within multitudes of infrared images. This paper details a program developed to automate the entire image analysis proce...

When planning production or remanufacturing capacity, it is necessary to use forecasts. In the case of production, demand must be forecasted; in the case of remanufacturing, core supply is also uncertain. In the remanufacturing literature, there are different methods to forecast product returns in the long term, mostly material-flow analysis, syste...

Establishing biorefineries can reduce environmental emissions and dependence on imported raw materials by substituting fossil-based products.Whereas energy utilization is in commercial use, the chemical utilization of biomass is still poorly established primarily because of the lack of feedstock [1]. Detailed assessment and mapping of recoverable b...

The current pandemic has disrupted many supply chains, among them food supply chains, and their physical and financial flows. Therefore, companies with high bargaining power may extend their payment terms to downstream suppliers as a reaction to decreased financial cash flow. We model a stylized three-stage food supply chain and use simulation to a...

Most automotive plastic waste (APW) is landfilled or used in energy recovery as it is unsuitable for high‐quality product mechanical recycling. Chemical recycling via pyrolysis offers a pathway toward closing the material loop by handling this heterogeneous waste and providing feedstock for producing virgin plastics. This study compares chemical re...

Autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) is a widely used building material for masonry blocks. Its porous structure and mineral composition lead to low thermal conductivity and fire resistance. European AAC production and usage strongly increased in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, assuming limited buildings’ lifetimes, significant post-demolition AAC vol...

Thermal Bridges on Building Rooftops (TBBR) is a multi-channel remote sensing dataset. It was recorded during six separate UAV fly-overs of the city center of Karlsruhe, Germany, and comprises a total of 926 high-resolution images with 6927 manually-provided thermal bridge annotations. Each image provides five channels: three color, one thermograph...

Purpose: Reduced availability of transport infrastructure affects highly dependent global supply chains (SCs), leading to modal shifts in the short term. Since relocation decisions of facilities may result in the long term, this paper evaluates companies’ business decisions in reaction to availability reductions of inland waterway transport (IWT)....

This data article describes an instance dataset motivated by the problem of scheduling a project with diverging material flows. Such material flows are released during the execution of the project and are subject to limited processing and storage capacities. Typical examples are nuclear dismantling or other deconstruction/demolition projects, where...

The growth of the battery powered vehicle market will lead to an increasing amount of End of Life (EoL) electric vehicle battery systems (EVBSs) in the future. Although pointed out as a future challenge by research as well as industry, the analysis and design of EoL traction batteries' recycling networks have not been conducted extensively. Existin...

Due to its high potential to perform many tasks faster, more accurately and in greater detail than humans artificial intelligence (AI) has been attracting growing attention across industries. In manufacturing, AI, in combination with digital sensors, networks and software-based automation, defines a new industrialization age. The integration of AI...

Thermal bridges are weak points of building envelopes that can lead to energy losses, collection of moisture, and formation of mould in the building fabric. To detect thermal bridges of large building stocks, drones with thermographic cameras can be used. As the manual analysis of comprehensive image datasets is very time-consuming, we investigate...

Greening cities is of considerable significance to creating sustainable cities. Cost-benefit analyses have shown that urban green is not only ecologically and socially desirable but also economically advantageous. However, maintaining this urban green is becoming challenging due to changing climatic conditions. With frequent heat-waves, droughts an...

Thermography for building audits is commonly carried out by means of terrestrial recording processes with static cameras. The implementation of drones to automatically acquire images from various perspectives can speed up and facilitate the procedure but requires higher recording distances, utilizes changing recording angles and has to contend with...

Autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) is a popular building material for masonry units, prefabricated reinforced components, and lightweight mineral insulation boards. However, post-demolition AAC (pd-AAC) is mainly disposed in landfills. In the future, wastes are expected to increase , landfill capacities will decrease and legal framework conditions w...

Autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) is a widely used building material for masonry units, prefabricated reinforced components, and lightweight mineral insulation boards. Its low thermal conductivity and good fire resistance increase its popularity in residential buildings. Thus, post-demolition wastes are expected to increase in the future. However,...

Urban green spaces are a critical component of cities, providing environmental, social, cultural, and economic benefits. To support smart(er) decisions by city planners and managers, this study aims to investigate how open data sources could be integrated into urban green space management. Specifically, it proposes a novel GIS-based method to prior...

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic led to restrictions in production worldwide. Numerous firms were affected and unable to keep up production due to lockdowns. In disruptive events like this, the resilience of the production system is of central importance, as the survivability of the entire firm depends on it. In this context, the literature ar...

Purpose This paper aims to enable the evaluation of systemic risks resulting from missing or misallocated repair measures of inland waterways infrastructure. In this context, cascading effects and risks arising from interdependent Critical Infrastructures (CIs) are of particular interest. The systemic risk assessment is implemented as a GIS-based t...

Governmental actors benefit from collaboration with companies in emergencies. Even though there are good reasons for companies to support state disaster response, research on so-called Public-Private Emergency Collaborations (PPEC) is still rare. In particular, companies are currently unable to assess to what extent the population values their invo...

Development of deconstruction and recycling standards for rotor blades (in German): As a result of the broad political support for the energy turnaround and the continued growing stock of wind turbines (WTG) in Germany and Europe, questions of maintenance, lifetime extension as well as turbine dismantling and recycling are gaining in importance....

Purpose—Unreliable transport infrastructure can cause negative externalities for industries. In this article, we analyze how the private sector is affected by infrastructure failure of public transport infrastructure, using waterways as an example. Methodology—To investigate the affectedness of riparian industries, we chose two complementary parall...

A growing plastic production increases the pressure on waste management systems, which have to cope with greater volumes of plastic waste. Increased plastics recycling can reduce environmental impacts by lowering the need for primary plastics production and thus fossil resources demand. Current research is mainly focused on identifying environmenta...

We study the problem of scheduling construction or deconstruction projects subject to temporal and renewable resource constraints to minimize the makespan. Moreover, we take into account material flows between activities of the project. Material flows can cause delays due to the limited capacity of intermediate storage facilities. In construction p...

Border regions between different countries are of special interest in studying international relationships, which is a current topic in today’s globalized and interconnected world. To strengthen their disaster resilience, it is important for local decision-makers to understand the spontaneous willingness of the population to help affected people in...

In the coming decades, the number of end-of-life (EoL) traction battery systems will increase sharply. The disassembly of the system to the battery module is necessary to recycle the battery modules or to be able to use them for further second-life applications. These different recovery paths are important pathways to archive a circular battery sup...

Densely built-up areas are challenged by reduced biodiversity, high volumes of runoff water, reduced evaporation, and heat accumulation. Such phenomena are associated with imperviousness and low, unsustainable utilisation of land and exterior building surfaces. Local authorities have multiple objectives when (re-)developing future-proof districts....

Increasing awareness of global and local climate change and the limited resources of land, surface, water, raw materials, urban green spaces, and biodiversity alter the exigencies of urban development. Already perceivable local climate changes such as heavy rains, droughts, and urban heat islands urge planners to take action. Particularly in densel...

In cases where the private sector struggles to cope with the impact of a disaster, authorities seek to reduce the burden on the population and set up supply chains to distribute essential goods. Therefore, they estimate the demand and location of the affected people and open points of distribution to supply goods from, e.g., public buildings or spo...

Remanufacturing is a key element of circular economy solutions as it aims at increasing the service lifetime of entire products or specific components, which may reduce the demand for new, resource-consuming devices. To assess the potential of disassembling and subsequent remanufacturing of EV batteries, we present a discrete event simulation appro...

Intermediate pyrolysis can be used to obtain high-quality biofuels from low-value residues such as sewage sludge or digestate. A major obstacle is the high water content of sludgy biomass, which requires an energy-intensive and expensive drying step before pyrolysis. Solar greenhouse drying is an efficient and sustainable alternative to a thermally...

This study deals with an extension of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) by constraints on material flows released during the execution of project activities. These constraints arise from limited processing capacities for materials and maximum inventories of intermediate storage facilities. Production scheduling problems wi...

Thermochemical biorefineries for the production of chemicals and materials can play an important role in the bioeconomy. However, their economic viability is often questioned under the premise of the economy of scale. This paper presents a regional, modular biorefinery concept for the production of the platform chemicals hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF)...

Global plastic production reached a new high in 2019. The high use of plastic leads to a high amount of plastic waste. Thereof, only 33% was collected for recycling in Europe. Plastic production depends on crude oil and energy and has high environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions. The recycling of plastic waste can reduce dependency o...

Cyber-attacks have a tremendous impact on worldwide economic performance. Hence, it is vitally important to implement effective risk management for different cyber-attacks, which calls for profound attacker models. However, cyber risk modelling based on attacker models seems to be restricted to overly simplified models. This hinders the understandi...

Porenbeton ist aufgrund seiner hervorragenden Dämmeigenschaften ein häufig verwendetes Baumaterial für Mauersteine sowie vorgefertigte bewehrte Bauteile und Mineraldämmplatten – mit wachsender Beliebtheit. Altporenbeton aus dem Abbruch und Rückbau von Gebäuden wird derzeit hauptsächlich deponiert. Deponiekapazitäten nehmen jedoch ab und der rechtli...

In many industrialized countries, a significant number of buildings were constructed prior to any energy-related building construction standards. Today, single-family houses (SFH/pl. SFHs) from this time still have a comparably poor thermal quality. This paper aims to examine and model the incentive effects of the German energy retrofit funding sch...

Cyber-security has emerged as one of the most pressing issues for society with actors trying to use offensive capabilities and those who try to leverage on defensive capabilities to secure their assets or knowledge. However, in cyber-space attackers oftentimes have a significant first mover advantage leading to a dynamic cat and mouse game with def...

Since the middle of the 20th century many any buildings were built without any energy standards and still have a comparably poor energy quality. To obtain an overview of the current thermal quality of buildings in a whole city district, it may be promising to work with thermographic images obtained by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Aerial thermogr...

Increasing ageing of transport infrastructures requires a systematic resilience-based maintenance strategy. However, the assessment of risk and resilience is problematic due to the manifold influencing factors and mechanisms within the complex socio-technical system of infrastructure maintenance. This paper provides an analysis of the intricate pro...

Das Projektmanagement gewinnt aufgrund kürzerer Produktlebenszyklen und eines schnelleren technologischen Wandels an Bedeutung. Für ein erfolgreiches Projektmanagement ist die Un-terstützung durch geeignete Projektmanagementsoftware erforderlich. Da hierfür zahlreiche Produkte auf dem Markt sind, befasst sich diese Studie mit einer aktuellen Bestan...

Der Beitrag beleuchtet das Konzept des Datenschutzes durch Technikgestaltung nach Art. 25 Abs.1 DSGVO im Spannungsfeld zwischen einer notwendigerweise abstrakten Risikoregulierung und den Gefahren der daraus folgenden Konkretisierungverantwortung datenverarbeitender Wirtschaftsunternehmen. Anhand einer spieltheoretischen Analyse wird nachvollzogen,...

Die Elektromobilität wird als Schlüsseltechnologie zur Senkung der CO 2 ‐Emissionen im Straßenverkehr gesehen. In der Diskussion um die Klimabilanz der Elektromobilität wird allerdings der hohe ökologische Fußabdruck in der Herstellung batterieelektrischer Fahrzeuge wenig adressiert, der sich insb. durch die ressourcenintensive Traktionsbatterie er...

Collaboration in emergency logistics can be beneficial for governmental actors when supply chains need to be set up immediately. In comparison to research on humanitarian-business partnerships, the body of literature on so-called Public–Private Emergency Collaborations (PPEC) remains scarce. Private companies are only rarely considered within resea...

Worldwide, wind turbine stocks are ageing and questions of reuse and recycling particularly of rotor blades become urgent. Especially, rising rotor blade wastes face lacking good recycling options and exact quantification is difficult due to information gaps on the rotor blade size, mass and exact material composition. In a combined approach, the e...

Purpose In this contribution, the purpose of this study is to extend the established social cost concept of humanitarian logistics into a preference-based bi-objective approach. The novel concept offers an efficient, robust and transparent way to consider the decision-maker’s preference. In principle, the proposed method applies to any multi-object...

Thermal bridges are weak areas of building envelopes that conduct more heat to the outside than surrounding envelope areas. They lead to increased energy consumption and the formation of mold. With a neural network approach, we demonstrate a method of automatically detecting thermal bridges on building rooftops from panorama drone images of whole c...

Electro-mobility is considered a key strategy to reduce GHG emissions in the transport sector and to make individual mobility more sustainable. However, the production of electric vehicles is accompanied by high environmental impacts, mainly due to the resource intensive high-voltage battery systems. Hence, a prerequisite for sustainable electro-mo...

The chemical industry accounts for 20% of global industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the plastics production is increasing worldwide by approx. 4% annually. To reduce GHG emissions and increase GHG transparency in chemical value chains despite industrial secrets, we developed an approach to estimate the product carbon footprint of chemica...

Usage of urban data to identify de-sealing potentials in dense urban districts

Autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) has a porous structure and excellent thermal properties. Therefore, it is a frequently used building material for masonry units, prefabricated reinforced components and lightweight mineral insulation boards with increasing popularity. Post-demolition AAC is currently mainly disposed of in landfills. Decreasing land...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions need to be reduced to limit global warming. Plastic production requires carbon raw materials and energy that are associated today with predominantly fossil raw materials and fossil GHG emissions. Worldwide, the plastic demand is increasing annually by 4%. Recycling technologies can help save or reduce GHG emissions, b...

During pandemics, regular service provisioning processes in medical care may be disrupted. Digital health promises many opportunities for service provisioning during a pandemic. However, a broad penetration of medical processes with information technology also has drawbacks. Within this work, the authors use the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze the cha...

The production, use, and final disposal of goods are directly linked to various environmental impacts caused along their supply chains and over their entire life cycles. When assessing these impacts for energy‐consuming products such as consumer electronics, not only the emissions caused during production but also the energy consumption during the...

The commitment of international governments to limit global warming to 2°C has led to an increased awareness and interest in sustainability from various stakeholders. Especially the ecological performances of corporations and their products regarding limiting greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) receives increasing attention. In Germany, almost 25% of th...

Der Beschluss des OLG Düsseldorf v. 26.08.2019, Az.: VI Kart 1/19 (V) in dem Kartellrechtsverfahren gegen Facebook wurde jüngst von dem Bundesgerichtshof mit dem Beschluss vom 23.06.2020, Az.: KVR 69/19 aufgehoben. Damit ist das Verbot des Bundeskartellamtes vorläufig durchsetzbar, dass ohne Einwilligung die von Facebook unabhängige Internetnutzung...

There is a great interest in society in making urban districts more sustainable. Sustainable and resource-efficient urban development (SDG 11) is a process that, based on the analysis of the initial situation, leads to the formulation of specific goals and must be planned, accompanied , assessed and managed. Thus, this contribution presents a funda...

In times of fast-growing stakeholder interest in sustainability, the ecological and social perspective of industrial companies and its products is gaining increasing importance. In particular, the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the automotive industry has come to the forefront of public and governmental attention. The transport sector accoun...

A shortage of water leads to severe consequences for populations. Recent examples like the ongoing water shortage in Kapstadt or in Gloucestershire in 2007 highlight both the challenges authorities face to restore the water supply and the importance of installing efficient preparedness measures and plans. This study develops a proactive planning ap...