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 explore one of the project's key deliverables, highlighting what it set out to achieve, what has been accomplished, and why it matters.
Following the work carried out to understand the needs of the battery value chain, the BASE Project reached another important milestone by finalising its system specifications and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This work builds directly on the requirements established earlier in the project and provides a clearer framework for developing, evaluating and validating the BASE solution.
From Requirements to Measurable Specifications
The previous stage of BASE focused on understanding what the Digital Battery Passport system would need to achieve. That involved examining stakeholder needs, identifying functional and non-functional requirements, assessing existing technologies and considering the gaps that would need to be addressed.
The next step was to turn those requirements into a more structured and measurable framework.
The finalised system specifications define the technical and operational characteristics that the BASE solution needs to meet. These include requirements related to system functionality, data management, performance, security, scalability and regulatory compliance.
This distinction between functional and non-functional requirements is important. Functional requirements describe what the system needs to do, such as managing data, supporting user interactions and enabling information exchange. Non-functional requirements describe how the system should operate, including expectations around performance, security, reliability, scalability and compliance.
Together, they provide a more complete picture of what a future BASE Digital Battery Passport system needs to deliver.
Developing KPIs Around the Requirements
Defining requirements alone is not enough. The project also needs a way to determine whether those requirements are being met.
This is where KPIs come in.
The BASE team developed KPIs by mapping them to the functional and non-functional requirements established through the earlier work. This creates a direct connection between what the system is expected to do and how its performance can be assessed.
The KPI development process followed the SMART approach, ensuring that indicators are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. This helps turn broad objectives into measurable criteria that can be monitored throughout the development and validation of the BASE solution.
The KPIs cover areas such as system performance, data accuracy, security, scalability, operational efficiency and regulatory compliance. Rather than treating performance measurement as a separate activity, the approach integrates it directly with the system requirements.
This gives the project a practical way to track progress and identify areas where further development or adjustment may be required.
A Collaborative Process
The final specifications and KPIs were not developed in isolation.
Task 2.4 involved workshops, meetings with system developers and discussions with project partners to review the requirements, gather feedback and refine the proposed KPIs. Partners were able to raise questions, identify ambiguities and suggest changes based on their expertise and the needs of the BASE use cases.
The process included nine meetings dedicated to reviewing and refining the requirements and KPIs.
This collaborative approach was particularly important because the BASE solution brings together different technologies, stakeholders and areas of expertise. Requirements that may appear suitable from a purely technical perspective still need to be practical for the organisations that will contribute, exchange or use battery data.
Feedback also helped the consortium distinguish between useful requirements and requests that would be unrealistic or disproportionate for the project. For example, requirements involving unlimited scalability or unrestricted real-time processing were reconsidered where they did not align with practical resource and system constraints.
The process concluded with a final workshop in Manchester during the project's General Assembly, providing an opportunity for consortium partners to review the final definitions, address remaining questions and confirm the agreed requirements and KPIs.
Connecting the Different Parts of BASE
One of the important outcomes of this work is the connection it creates between the different technical activities taking place across the project.
The finalised requirements and KPIs provide a common reference point for the work being carried out in the later stages of BASE. The technology development roadmap considers the Technology Readiness Levels needed to progress from existing solutions towards the capabilities required by the project.
This roadmap is aligned with the work of the next work packages, covering areas such as battery performance and safety, circularity, ESGE indicators, and the development and integration of the Battery Passport platform. The requirements and KPIs will also support the validation activities planned under WP7.
In this way, the specifications do more than describe the intended system. They help connect the different technical developments into a coordinated development process, while the KPIs provide a way to assess progress against the requirements.
Why Is This Important?
A Digital Battery Passport needs to bring together information from different stages of a battery's lifecycle while meeting requirements for traceability, security, interoperability and regulatory compliance.
That makes it important to set clear expectations before developing and integrating the different technical components.
The finalised BASE system specifications provide that common reference. They describe the capabilities and characteristics the solution must achieve, while the KPI framework sets measurable criteria to assess whether those expectations are met.
This also creates a foundation for continuous improvement. As the BASE technologies move through development, integration and validation, the requirements and KPIs can help the consortium identify gaps, monitor performance and make informed adjustments.
In practical terms, the work moves BASE from defining what the solution needs to achieve towards having measurable criteria for determining whether it is achieving it.
Looking Ahead
With the system specifications and KPIs established, BASE has a clearer framework for the next stages of technical development.
The requirements will inform the development and integration of the project's different technologies, while the KPI framework will provide a basis for monitoring their performance. Together, they support the transition from requirements definition towards building, integrating and validating the Digital Battery Passport solution.
This is another step towards the wider BASE vision: a secure and interoperable Digital Battery Passport ecosystem capable of supporting traceability, sustainability and circularity across the battery value chain.
As we continue through the Inside BASE series, we'll explore the next stages of this journey and look at how these requirements begin to translate into the technologies, tools and platform components being developed across the project.
The BASE project has received funding from the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON) Research and Innovation Actions under grant agreement No. 101157200.