Summary from Annales des Mines “Le Numérique pour la réindustrialisation” - Dawex and CEA contribution to the December 2024 issue.
In a context of globalized value chain and heightened competition, industrial data spaces are emerging as an innovative solution to future challenges. These collaborative ecosystems bring together stakeholders with common interests to facilitate the secure and trusted exchange and sharing of data. They improve operations, help meet regulatory requirements and optimize decision-making.
Strong governance is essential to orchestrate these exchanges and ensure effective collaboration.
Industrial data spaces have become essential to the growth of European industry. The industrial and operational benefits of creating industrial data spaces are undeniable. Industrial data spaces optimize processes and enhance the competitiveness of companies by strengthening their resilience in the face of crises. What's more, in a context of globalization, these industrial data spaces are essential for strengthening the competitiveness and resilience of European industries.
By facilitating the exchange of data between suppliers, partners and customers, data spaces foster innovation, reduce costs, improve quality and accelerate the development of new products. Manufacturers must also comply with increasingly demanding regulations, such as ESPR and CSRD, which impose greater transparency in terms of sustainability and traceability. The Data Act adds requirements for sharing data collected via connected objects. These industrial data spaces facilitate compliance with these new European regulations.
Example of Data4Industry-X, a technological solution for implementing industrial data spaces. Data4Industry-X, supported by the French government as part of the France 2030 plan, and by Alliance Industrie du Futur, brings together major industrial organizations such as Valeo, Schneider Electric and CEA-List, as well as specialist technology players such as Prosyst and Dawex.
A flagship project within the broader Manufacturing-X, Data4Industry-X is the trusted, secure and sovereign data exchange solution for the industry, under the control of manufacturers, that meets the challenges of data exchange in a decentralized manufacturing environment.
One of Data4Industry-X use cases is around circular economy, with projects such as CIRPASS 1 and 2 helping companies to comply with European sustainability regulations. These initiatives aim to define Digital Product Passports (DPPs) and the information system architecture required for their deployment.
The construction of an industrial data space rests on several essential foundations. Data must be hosted on infrastructures that are accessible and adapted to the needs of the stakeholders involved in the data collaboration. To orchestrate data spaces, high-performance technical solutions are needed to manage data exchanges, thereby creating trust and guaranteeing the security and traceability of exchanged data, while complying with regulations. Vertical business applications must be coherently integrated into these data spaces to meet the various use cases identified. And global governance, supported by an orchestrator, is needed to ensure the coherence and efficiency of the entire system.
Interoperability is a major challenge in the construction of industrial data spaces. Managing this complexity is essential, especially for industrial players involved in multiple value chains and data spaces. It is crucial to solve interoperability issues both within a data space and between different spaces.
This interoperability is ensured at several levels. In terms of governance, clear rules for data exchange and protection must be established. Technically and syntactically, common standards must be defined to enable data exchange between different infrastructures. A major challenge remains semantic interoperability, which is essential if applications are to interact automatically with little or no human intervention.
The construction of semantic interoperability in industrial data ecosystems can follow several complementary paths. The first is standardization, which involves validating and applying industrial data standards at European level, or beyond, and thus defining formats, vocabularies and data models recognized by an entire industrial sector. Another approach is upstream verification, where tools are used to validate that data exchanged between different production units conforms to a defined standard. Finally, recent technological advances in machine translation are promising solutions. This could make it possible to automatically convert data into the desired semantic formats.
Industrial data spaces are now a booming reality, thanks to initiatives and technologies to make them interoperable making rapid progress. Operational implementations already exist in various sectors, such as agriculture, airport, automotive and construction, and many others are underway in energy and aeronautics, where data-driven collaboration has become essential.
For industrial companies, it is crucial to commit now to the creation of trusted data spaces, and to invest in the necessary skills and technologies. Interoperability is not limited to information technology; it also affects accounting rules, particularly those integrating the value of a company's data assets as a balance sheet asset, such as the new rules in China since January 1, 2024. Europe's proactive approach to this issue could become a powerful lever for value creation, encouraging executives to accelerate the digitization of their businesses, thereby strengthening their resilience and competitiveness.
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