ESCOM – Balanced edge-cloud environments for sovereign component service systems in production applications

The project ESCOM focuses on how component manufacturers can participate in data-based business models in sovereign and open edge cloud data spaces.

Coordination: Oliver Kohn M.Sc.
Contact person in the research group TEC:
Lucas Gräff M.Sc.
Oliver Kohn M.Sc.
Viktor Berchtenbreiter M.Sc.

Duration: 01.10.2022 – 30.09.2025
Funded by: Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action
Webseite:www.escom.euprogigant.com

Motivation

The data strategy for Europe published by the EU Commission in 2020 sets the objective of creating a “Single Market for European Data”, which will be made up of various data spaces in different domains, such as the manufacturing industry. For the manufacturing industry, this offers the potential to develop its own solutions for the value-creating processing and useage of large volumes of data. The Gaia-X initiative takes up the EU's objective and develops a framework for the development and use for federated services to ensure secure, sovereign data exchange guaranteed under European law. The representations in the EU Green Deal show that the utilization of data in data spaces of ecosystems have the potential to unlock major levers for reducing climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions.

Objectives

By combining existing and largely unified digital technologies ESCOM develops a vendor-independent access for the machine end users to the know-how of component manufacturers in the form of digital services in an edge-cloud-environment. For the project partners this results in product-specific innovations. Today, these still represent a mostly supply-oriented market perspective, because the exchange with the end user has been lacking up to now. This is changing through the application of component service systems in open, sovereign edge cloud environments to demand-oriented market perspectives that represent greater market potential for component manufacturers and are characterized by collaborative, interdisciplinary co-innovations in line with the machine manufacturer as OEM.

Approaches

In the first step, the sustainable value propositions to the stakeholders in the ecosystem of the project are formulated for the two use cases. This is done using a methodology for business model development in the context of Gaia-X that was further developed in the EuProGiant project and results in a business model canvas for the overall ecosystem. In the second step, the relevant processes, components and data for implementation are identified, and in each case the data value chain, including value-determining information, is presented in the form of a data value Sankey diagram to enable a cost-benefit forecast. In the third step, digital masters of the components are developed based on the concept of AAS. In the fourth step, the interaction between the machine manufacturer or the machine user with the externally accessible interaction layer of the IoT platform, which takes place in the Gaia-X-compliant data ecosystem according to sovereign principles, takes place. The consumer detaches individual, consumable submodels from the digital master and brings them into use in his edge cloud environment as a submodel instance.

Acknowledgements

The research project is funded by the federal ministry for economic affairs and climate action (BMWK). We thank for the opportunity to work on this project.

Funding source

Consortium partners