The Manufacturing-X funding program creates the necessary structures for cooperation that would not come about under purely market conditions. It also promotes the transfer of project results to the wider industry and internationalization. The first funding projects were launched at the beginning of 2024 and will run until 2026.
Manufacturing-X Funding Program
Introduction
The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) is supporting the Manufacturing-X initiative with an accompanying funding program to support cross-industry, pre-commercial research and development projects in the further development of basic technologies and the implementation of priority use cases for the cross-industry Manufacturing-X data ecosystem.
Current Funding Projects
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Aerospace-X
Under the leadership of Airbus, the Aerospace-X consortium has been formed from 14 companies and research institutions. Main objectives of this funding project are to establish an open data ecosystem for the entire aerospace industry, to ensure digital continuity and to enable new forms of collaborative, data-based value creation. The project will build on the preliminary work of Catena-X and adapt the technologies and standards developed there for its own industry and develop them further in an interoperable manner.
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Decide4ECO
The Decide4ECO project considers and evaluates sustainabilty requirements and the achievement of sustainability goals. As a large proportion of resource consumption is already determined during product planning and development, the project starts at this stage and develops digital solutions to support sustainable decision making in development and production. The assessment aims at both taking the entire value chain and product life cycle into account.
The data on which the sustainability analysis is to be based must be collected across the entire production and supply chain. The necessary data exchange along supply chains is to be implemented based on common standards in the Manufacturing-X data ecosystem, for which open interfaces and standards are being developed in the project. A standardized digital product passport (DPP) is to be provided in the shared data ecosystem and supplemented with information. The software solutions for evaluating sustainability based on this are to consider all relevant upstream and downstream processes and also be supplemented by predictive, AI-based impact analyses.
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Factory-X
In the Factory-X lighthouse project, 47 partners are working together under the leadership of Siemens and SAP. The primary goal is to create an open and collaborative data ecosystem for factory equipment suppliers and operators based on the Catena-X model and the concepts of Platform Industrie 4.0.
At the same time, the consortium is responsible for setting up coordination structures for the cross-project development of an interoperable Manufacturing-X architecture with common rules and standards. The project is also actively promoting the establishment of an international Manufacturing-X network.
