Germany Industry’s “Industrial Data Space”: First Impressions

Germany considers sovereignty in digital matters a key factor for the competitiveness of it’s industry.  As processes, products and services become richer in digital content, and provide key enablers for innovation and new, value adding business models, digital cooperation and exchange between value chain partners must be safe, secure, trusted, and reliable, and intellectual property of the users of these data must be protected.

To create and guarantee these conditions, twelve German Fraunhofer Institutes started a three-year “Industrial Data Space Research Project”, supported by the German government with the goals to:

• Design a reference architecture model for the Industrial Data Space


• Pilot the reference architecture model in selected use cases

The project is closely aligned with the Industrie 4.0 initiative, that is focused on manufacturing.

The project is flanked by the chartered industry association “Industrial Data Space e.V.” The association will define user requirements and define use cases. According to its president and chairman of the board, Dr.-Ing. Reinhold Achatz, from ThyssenKrupp, the objective of the association is to define and promote a cross industry standard for a cloud based, secure data exchange between industrial companies from all industry sectors. The key paradigm is that the organization that originates data remains the owner of those data.

A key issue paper published on the Fraunhofer site (http://bit.ly/1QXOoFF), and officially reased at the CeBIT conference on March 17^thstates the initiative should be aligned with international initiatives on privacy and security.  In my view, this will be key for the standard to have impact in the global business environment.

I also believe that security and privacy must be seamless with other verticals beyond industrial production sectors.  If a products leaves the manufacturing or logistics activity associated with it and enters the retail, construction or agricultural market privacy and security must continue to be protected, and ideally in a consistent way that does not create additional effort.  I believe the EU has set the right target that it should be simple and low cost to make IoT seamless across industry verticals. It is probably worth connecting the Industrial Data Space with activities of the Alliance for IoT Innovation co-sponsored by the EU.

I have studied a case of a process technology and engineering services provider who provides digital or connected services to an owner operator (OO) licensing their technology. 24/7 monitoring of the owner-operator’s plants, processes and equipment performance enabled to reduce downtime and cost by reducing latency in taking corrective action. The trust between the two companies is based on using a transfer technology through the cloud using encryption and the ISO 27001 compliance of the service provider.  Also here the Owner-Operator remains the owner of the data. I would say the OO must own the data to fulfill his responsibility for safe and compliant operation.

Questions arise however how to handle the ownership of research results, based on data from several OO’s.  My suggestion is that they may by handled through consortia, but the final word is not said.  It would be important for the industry to know how the Industrial Data Space complements the ISO 27000 series. The article about this case study will be published soon on www.arcweb.com most likely in the coming week(s).

In an upcoming blog we will compare the initiative with the “Smart Service Welt”, a similar initiative also in parallel with Industrie 4.0, published in 2014.