SdManuX - GAIA-X4ICM

Gaia-X is a project to create a high-performance, competitive, secure and trusted data infrastructure for Europe, developed by representatives from business, science and politics. The goal is to build a secure networked data infrastructure that meets the highest standards of digital sovereignty and promotes innovation. In an open and transparent digital ecosystem, data and services are to be disclosed, combined, shared and used.

Although Gaia-X has recently evolved from an abstract idea to a real architecture and first services, neither science nor industry has benefited from it yet. Research and further development of the architecture and components developed so far are difficult due to the lack of specific implementations and experiences and the high barriers to entry into the topic. Therefore, the potential and the current status of the project show a strong disparity.

Aim and approach

The goal of the project is to make Gaia-X usable, to create a specific instance for this purpose, to enable coupling with production systems and thus to create the basis for a strongly scaling innovation platform for the Innovation Campus Future Mobility (ICM), but also beyond that in research and industry.

The planned work is divided into three subprojects:

1. To create a basic infrastructure, necessary hardware resources and software solutions will be instantiated. An integral part is a convergent communication technology, which plays a significant role for the connectivity of Gaia-X up to production systems.
2. The Gaia-X ecosystem is built on top of the infrastructure and distributed across the cloud and edge nodes. In addition to basic services and data spaces, the focus here is on suitable processes which, among other things, should enable the secure and systematic on-boarding of new services and participants.
3. At the application level, various applications are implemented that couple innovative digital approaches with real production scenarios. The implementation will take place at several locations and includes the integration of the infrastructure in data centers as well as the coupling with real production systems in research factories. The infrastructure, the developed methods as well as the experiences will be actively made available to further actors in the ICM. The aim is to use them in existing projects as well as in new activities.