In a world in which digitalization and data management are becoming increasingly important, industrial data rooms are also coming more and more into focus for manufacturing companies. Cross-company data rooms, such as those being researched in the Manufacturing-X initiative, can play a decisive role in helping companies to achieve economies of scale, open up new business areas and thus operate more efficiently overall. Fraunhofer IESE has addressed this topic together with NetApp Deutschland GmbH, the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA), Plattform Industrie 4.0, Xitaso GmbH and congatec GmbH and developed a software-as-a-service solution in the form of AAS Dataspace for Everybody.

User-friendly solution with the help of Eclipse BaSyx

The AAS Dataspace for Everybody offers companies a user-friendly data sharing platform and preconfigured software solutions based on the open source middleware Eclipse BaSyx. With this tool, companies can create digital twins of their production lines, calculate their carbon footprint and implement digital product passports. “The software containers in combination with the Eclipse BaSyx middleware used are absolutely unique on the market so far,” explains Dr. Thomas Kuhn, Division Manager ‘Embedded Systems’ at Fraunhofer IESE, and adds: ”With the AAS Dataspace for Everybody, companies of all sizes have the opportunity to integrate data spaces really seamlessly into their production and thus benefit from considerable time and cost savings in digitization.”

Industry giants discuss data spaces

The highlights of the opening event included the various applications and usage scenarios of the AAS Dataspace for Everybody. Well-known industrial companies such as SAP, Wittenstein, Thyssenkrupp, Bosch and Mitsubishi were on hand to share their experiences of digital data spaces and Industry 4.0. Research and business partners also gave keynote speeches on the wide range of possible uses.

“The AAS Dataspace for Everybody is an important milestone for the development of industrial ecosystems based on the Asset Administration Shell. Together with our partners Fraunhofer IESE, NetApp Germany and others, we are proud to provide this opportunity to test business processes along the supply chain in a real industrial ecosystem. Together, we are thus decisively advancing the industrial implementation of interoperable digital twins,” says Meik Billmann, Managing Director of IDTA.

“With the AAS Dataspace for Everybody, we at Wittenstein want to publish the asset administration shells we have already created, network and establish connectivity ─ from engineering to after sales. We also see great added value in the data that we get back if we also share our product data and models in this data space,” adds Bernd Vojanec, Senior Expert Industrial Digital Twin at the WITTENSTEIN group.

Project partners:
congatec GmbH, Fraunhofer IESE, Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA), NetApp Deutschland GmbH, Plattform Industrie 4.0, Xitaso GmbH

Further information on the AAS Dataspace for Everybody:
https://www.iese.fraunhofer.de/en/solution/dataspace.html