Welcome to Inside BASE, a blog series where we take you behind the scenes of the BASE Project and share the progress being made towards building a trusted, interoperable Digital Battery Passport ecosystem. In each edition, we'll explore one of the project's key milestones, highlighting what it set out to achieve, what has been accomplished, and why it matters.
We begin with Requirement Analysis, the first major milestone under Solution Requirements and KPIs.
Before developing a complex digital solution, it is essential to understand what the solution needs to do, who will use it, what information it needs to handle, and what challenges it needs to address. Requirement Analysis was designed to answer these questions and establish a clear direction for the technical development of BASE.
BASE Requirement Analysis: What is it About?
At its core, the analysis was about turning the vision for BASE into a clear set of requirements for the Digital Battery Passport and the technologies that will support it.
The work followed a user-driven approach, bringing together stakeholder feedback, interviews, questionnaires and workshops to understand the needs of different actors across the battery value chain. Instead of designing the solution in isolation, the BASE consortium sought to understand how batteries and their data are currently managed, where challenges exist, and what users would need from a future Digital Battery Passport.
The analysis also looked beyond user needs. It assessed the current state of relevant technologies, identified gaps between what is currently available and what BASE aims to achieve, and examined the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) needed to move these technologies towards real-world application.
Together, these activities provided the basis for a development roadmap aligned with the project's subsequent technical work and validation activities.
Listening to the Battery Value Chain
Understanding the requirements of a Digital Battery Passport means understanding the people and organisations that will create, provide, use and update its data.
As part of the user-driven methodology, the consortium conducted interviews with practitioners and developed questionnaires covering areas such as battery specifications, safety, performance, hazardous materials, data management, regulatory compliance, sustainability and data ownership.
The research also looked at how organisations currently handle their information. One important finding was that data availability and automation vary considerably across the battery value chain.
Collectors reported having almost 95% of the relevant data, while OEMs had approximately 90% of the necessary data available. However, much of the OEM data was still collected manually. Cell and module producers generated around 70% of relevant data, but only around 20% of this was automated. Miners and refiners faced greater challenges in both data availability and automation.
These findings highlight an important challenge for the future of battery data sharing: having the information is one thing, but making it accessible, consistent and usable across different organisations is another.
Defining What Information the Battery Passport Needs
The analysis also examined the data required for a Digital Battery Passport.
Based on the EU Battery Regulation and previous European projects, the BASE team identified 113 data points across seven broad categories:
- General Product & Manufacturer Information
- Materials & Composition
- Value Chain Traceability
- Environmental & Social Impact
- Circularity & End-of-Life Management
- Compliance, Labels & Certifications
- Performance & Durability
Performance and durability accounted for the largest share, with 52 data points, followed by circularity and end-of-life management with 19, and materials and composition with 17.
Importantly, the analysis also recognised that battery data does not remain static. As a battery moves through its lifecycle, its Digital Battery Passport needs to evolve with it. Maintenance, repairs, second-life applications and end-of-life activities can generate new information, while new passports may need to be linked to previous ones when a battery enters a new application. This helps preserve the battery's history throughout its lifecycle.
From requirements to a BASE solution
The stakeholder research and data analysis were then translated into functional and non-functional requirements for the BASE solution.
These requirements cover four major areas: the portal, data and data carriers, data spaces, and analytical tools.
In practical terms, the future BASE solution is expected to support secure user onboarding, intelligent regulatory compliance, the management of both static and dynamic battery data, and the use of identifiers such as QR codes and other data carriers.
It is also designed to enable secure data exchange and traceability across the battery value chain, while ensuring that data can be authenticated, protected and accessed according to the user's role.
Beyond storing and sharing information, the requirements include analytical capabilities covering battery State-of-X (SoX), safety, circularity, ESGE and business analysis. These tools are intended to turn battery data into useful insights for decision-making across the battery lifecycle.
The analysis also defines important qualities the platform needs to provide, including security, scalability, availability, interoperability, usability and data protection.
Testing the vision across four real-world scenarios
The requirements were not developed as an abstract exercise. BASE is designed around four different use cases covering automotive, marine and stationary energy storage applications.
The first focuses on the Mercedes-Benz eCitaro electric bus, with particular attention to battery safety, State-of-X assessment, circularity and ESGE indicators.
The second, led by Ford Otosan, explores a modular electric vehicle platform and contributes battery ageing, safety, State-of-Health and ESGE data.
The third focuses on electric tugboats, using real battery data to investigate battery health, safety and circularity, including second-life and end-of-life considerations.
The fourth, led by BeePlanet Factory, focuses on second-life stationary energy storage, using aged EV batteries and examining their reuse, recycling, circularity, safety and ESGE performance.
Together, these use cases provide different perspectives on how a Digital Battery Passport can support batteries throughout their lifecycle.
Looking beyond today's technology
Requirement Analysis also examined the technologies that will contribute to the BASE solution, including battery safety techniques, ESGE indicators and the ESGE Scoreboard Toolkit, circularity and LCA tools, AI-based tools and the Digital Battery Passport itself.
The analysis identified several gaps that need to be addressed. These include fragmented battery data, limited access to dynamic lifecycle information, challenges around data interoperability, underdeveloped circularity metrics, gaps in lifecycle data, and the need for more comprehensive end-to-end validation.
BASE therefore aims not simply to adopt existing technologies, but to develop and mature them for the specific needs of the battery value chain.
For example, the project aims to advance rapid battery health assessment, safety monitoring, ESGE analytics, circularity tools, LCA, AI-based remaining useful life prediction and 4R business analytics. Several of these technologies are expected to progress towards Technology Readiness Level 7, where they can be demonstrated in operational environments.
Why is this important?
Requirement Analysis may not be a finished technology that users can interact with, but it provides something equally important at this stage of the project: a shared direction.
It connects stakeholder needs with technical requirements, identifies where current solutions fall short, defines the information that needs to be managed, and maps out the development challenges that BASE needs to address.
It also provides the foundation for coordinating the technical work across the project. The resulting roadmap is intended to synchronise development across the project and the validation activities in after development, helping ensure that the different components can ultimately work together as part of one coherent solution.
In this sense, Requirement Analysis marks an important transition for BASE: from a high-level vision of what a Digital Battery Passport could achieve to a much clearer understanding of what needs to be built to make that vision possible.
Looking Ahead
Requirement Analysis lays the groundwork for the technical journey ahead. The requirements, data structures, technology assessments and development roadmap established through this work will help guide the next stages of BASE as the consortium develops the technologies and platform needed to support a more transparent, sustainable and circular battery value chain.
And this is only the beginning of the story.
Through Inside BASE, we'll continue following the project's progress, exploring the work being carried out across its different work packages and looking at how individual technologies and solutions contribute to the bigger picture.
Stay tuned for the next edition of Inside BASE.
The BASE project has received funding from the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON) Research and Innovation Actions under grant agreement No. 101157200.