Fraunhofer IESE presents new Industry 4.0 solution for low-threshold access to data rooms

"Energising a Sustainable Industry" - the motto of Hannover Messe 2024 clearly shows how important an equally powerful and sustainable industry is for Germany as a manufacturing location. This year, more than 4,000 companies will be presenting new products and solutions at the world's leading trade fair for industry that help to harmonise climate neutrality and efficiency in manufacturing.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE from Kaiserslautern will also be presenting an innovative solution at the joint stand of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Hall 2, Stand B24) that makes it easier for companies of all sizes to join data spaces and thus paves the way for them to enter the world of digitalisation: the AAS Dataspace for Everybody.

In a world in which digitalisation and data management are becoming increasingly important, industrial data rooms are also becoming more and more of a focus for manufacturing companies. Cross-company data spaces, 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 - provided that the manufacturing processes themselves are already sufficiently digital to enable comprehensive networking in the first place. However, this is precisely where many companies are still reaching their limits. The necessary software solutions are often complex and require specific expertise, which in turn makes the digitalisation of production very time-consuming and cost-intensive.

Fraunhofer IESE has tackled this problem together with renowned partner companies and developed a software-as-a-service solution that enables small and medium-sized companies in particular to digitalise manufacturing processes, create digital twins and administration shells and integrate these into data rooms. Together with NetApp, the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA), Plattform Industrie 4.0 and Congatec GmbH, the Fraunhofer researchers will be using the "AAS Dataspace for Everybody" exhibit at the Hannover Messe (Hall 2, Stand B24) to show exactly how companies can easily and simply integrate this new Industry 4.0 solution into their existing software and manufacturing environments.

Digital twins as the key to digital supply chains

The AAS Dataspace for Everybody offers a platform for the uncomplicated sharing of data as well as preconfigured software solutions based on the open source middleware Eclipse BaSyx. This enables companies to realise digital twins along their production lines, allowing them to calculate their carbon footprint, create a battery passport or produce digital product passports, for example. The digital twins can then be shared in cross-company data rooms along supply chains - confidently and in compliance with clearly defined specifications. This enables disruptions in the value chain to be recognised at an early stage and the resilience and sustainability of the industry to be significantly strengthened.

To make it as easy as possible for companies to get started with digitalisation, Fraunhofer IESE is initially making the preconfigured solutions available as prototypes. In this way, companies can store their test data in a data room, share it and thus easily try out the potential that a data room offers them in principle. "The software containers in combination with the embedded middleware Eclipse BaSyx are absolutely unique on the market," 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 rooms really seamlessly into their production and thus benefit from considerable time and cost savings in digitalisation."

Larger companies in particular can easily create around one billion digital twins in the course of digitalising their production. The necessary infrastructure is required to create them, as Jürgen Hamm, Solution Architect SAP/Specialist Industry 4.0 at NetApp, explains: "Together with Fraunhofer IESE, we have been working for years on future-proof solutions for the use of digital twins based on a high-performance IT infrastructure. In order to be able to efficiently test suitable use cases across the entire process chain, we are building on our expertise in data management and flexibly using the entire NetApp product range. Digital twins also score points in terms of sustainability: they are a way of creating meaningful carbon footprint reporting, for example against the backdrop of the digital product passport."