IDTA has officially opened the AAS Dataspace for Everybody, a platform that makes it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises to access data rooms, digital twins and administration shells. More than 60 representatives from science and industry met at the opening ceremony at Fraunhofer IESE in Kaiserslautern to discuss the added value and potential applications of digital data spaces.
Cross-company data rooms for new business areas
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 and the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA), together with NetApp Deutschland GmbH, Plattform Industrie 4.0, Xitaso GmbH and congatec GmbH, have addressed this issue and developed a software-as-a-service solution in the form of AAS Dataspace for Everybody.
User-friendly platform for sharing data
The new platform offers companies a user-friendly platform for sharing data as well as 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."
First use cases were presented at the opening ceremony
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.
"At Wittenstein, we want to use the platform to publish the administration shells we have already created, to network and to 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 room," adds Bernd Vojanec, Senior Expert Industrial Digital Twin at the WITTENSTEIN group.
Further information is available at www.industrialdigitaltwin.org.
