Research Projects

Below you will find a small selection of ongoing and completed research projects in which wibfin or academic partners of our institute are or were involved.

Intelli-Pack – Intelligent packaging with TTIs for food products in cold chains

Prof. Dr. Rolf Ibald receives the funding notice for Intelli-Pack from Federal Minister Julia Klöckner — Prof. Dr. Rolf Ibald receives the funding notice for the Intelli-Pack research project from Julia Klöckner, then German Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture. At the time, Prof. Ibald, as a professor at the Europäische Fachhochschule (EUFH), was responsible for the funding application together with colleagues from the University of Bonn.

Intelli-Pack was a three-year joint research project completed in 2021. Its main topic was the use of TTIs in temperature-controlled supply chains for specific foods. In the project, the TTIs were tested in various types of packaging, both in laboratories and in real supply chains. A key question was whether the colour change of the TTIs could be measured with ordinary mobile phones and used to calculate the current remaining shelf life.

Main content:

Testing TTIs – time-temperature indicators – as labels that change colour from dark blue to light blue as a function of time and temperature.
Adapting the colour kinetics of the TTIs to the spoilage kinetics of specific foods.
Developing an app that reads the TTIs and calculates the remaining shelf life of packaged food based on the TTI colour values and a serialised barcode on the packaging.

Project partners were the Universities of Bonn and Bayreuth, the universities of applied sciences EUFH and Münster, and the companies Wolf Wurstspezialitäten GmbH, Genusshandwerker GmbH & Co. KG, Bizerba Labels & Consumables GmbH, EECC GmbH, Landpack GmbH and Metro Logistics Germany GmbH.
For further information, please contact us or visit intelli-pack.de (in German).

PackAn – Assessing the sustainability of food packaging in specific supply chains

Development of an algorithm for assessing the sustainability of food packaging along the entire value chain. The aim is to provide supply chain stakeholders and consumers with information that helps them identify sustainable packaging solutions and thereby increase their use.

Main content:

Development of a sustainability assessment algorithm that takes into account the interplay between packaging, product and supply chain. An example of the trade-offs involved: plastic packaging is generally regarded as unsustainable, yet it extends the shelf life of many foods. Think of cucumbers from Spain for the German market, with and without plastic wrap: with the wrap, waste is considerably lower than without.
Provision of an assessment tool for companies to choose the right packaging. Using the algorithm, companies can simulate sustainability even before selecting a specific packaging.
Creation of a website with short films explaining the relationships.
Development and proposal of a certification standard.

The project started in December 2022 and was completed in November 2025. Project partners were Hochschule Geisenheim University, Cologne Business School GmbH, AGRIZERT Zertifizierungs GmbH, snoopmedia GmbH and ThurnFilm GmbH.
For further information, please contact us or visit packan-plattform.de (in German).

Beergame ++ – Developing a digital twin to simulate and control supply chains

We have extended our in-house Beergame with numerous parameters and are continuously developing it further – including CO₂ charges, transport costs and sales revenues. This makes it possible to teach not only the classic bullwhip effect but also other concepts of quantity planning, such as the newsvendor model for products with a limited sales window within the supply chain.

We have also implemented a market simulation. We plan to extend the model beyond the current four stakeholders – brewery, distributor, wholesaler and retailer – to include further actors, so that real supply chains can be mapped using a flexible network structure. The actual goal, a true digital twin, will be reached once the individual stakeholders can be connected to the real world via interfaces.

Sustscore – General sustainability assessment of processes, materials, applications and supply chains

The Sustscore project builds directly on the PackAn research project. It pursues two goals: first, to make the project idea developed in PackAn usable in practice, and second, to transfer the underlying assessment approach to other products, product groups and processes. A first version, currently covering the content of the PackAn project, is available at www.sustscore.de.