On average 50% of production ends as scrap. This indicates a considerable innovation potential, nonetheless companies struggle to exploit it. Apart from the fact new technologies are often costly & time-consuming to implement, the main challenge is data continuity. For this reason, ensuring data continuity has become one of the main priorities of the industry and it represents a core pillar of the Qu4lity project. In the connected factories of the future data will flow freely from different endpoints. Nonetheless, interoperability is not enough. Companies are very much concerned about the risks related to misuse of their data and this often leads to a considerable reluctance to share it. This is why it is not simply a standard for interoperability that we need, but a standard for data sovereignty.

The not-for-profit association International Data Spaces Association has been working on this concept for years now, together with the expertise of its 130+ members from 22 countries. In addition to a technology-agnostic, cross-sectorial standard for data exchange, the IDS approach is also enriched with a certification process that ensures trustworthy data transactions, data usage policies, and an overall governance framework.

The IDS approach has been embraced by the Qu4lity project in addition to the classical RAMI 4.0 model, in order to have wider outlook to what the next era of the data economy will be: several “data spaces” able to share data with each other while ensuring data governance and sovereignty for the data provider. For the Qu4lity project this means that, thanks to the IDS approach, the pilots will not only be able to ensure data continuity among each other within the project, but their companies are also getting prepared to share data in a sovereign manner with several other external companies and data spaces.

This is a great opportunity to leverage for all those that are interested in exploiting the full potential of Zero-Defect Manufacturing and Industry 4.0, as it is very well shown by the Qu4lity project.