Aerospace-X

Aerospace-X is a project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action for the aviation industry with 14 renowned partners from industry and research. The goal of the project is to create a collaborative ecosystem for sustainability and circular economy in the aviation industry and to future-proof supply chains through digitalization and data sovereignty.

Use cases include managing demand and capacity, calculating and sharing product carbon footprints, and creating digital product passports for components and aircraft. This also supports circular economy approaches that aim to close material loops, whether through recycling, the use of secondary materials or the reuse of components. In addition, the project will develop decision support systems and end-to-end quality and non-conformity management to ensure that future aircraft and their components are designed to be circular, efficient, with reduced environmental impact and to the highest quality standards.

Our role in the project

As an application-oriented research partner, Fraunhofer IPK is responsible for the overall coordination of the participating Fraunhofer Institutes (Fraunhofer IFAM, Fraunhofer IPT, Fraunhofer ISST and Fraunhofer IPK) and contributes its expertise to the implementation of the project in four areas:

Governance:

Developing a holistic data ecosystem concept that integrates relevant concepts from different areas, such as Catena-X, Gaia-X, the Industry 4.0 platform and the aviation-specific projects in Manufacturing-X
Fraunhofer IPK is responsible for identifying and describing industry requirements, developing concept papers for an overall governance structure, integrating existing preliminary work into multilateral structures such as Catena-X, and coordinating activities across the Manufacturing-X projects.

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Use case CO2 emissions & PCF regulations:

(Further) development of a harmonized set of rules for the Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) in the aerospace industry and integration into a Digital Product Passport (DPP).

Fraunhofer IPK is responsible for analyzing the transferability of the Catena-X results, developing a consolidated and interoperable solution for the circular economy, ensuring consistent data models and solutions with Catena-X, other overarching projects and the Industrial Digital Twin Association e.V. (IDTA), and achieving a coordinated architecture for the overall project.

Circular economy use case:

Implementing circular economy strategies and establishing digital twins in the aviation industry by creating a continuous data and material cycle across the entire life cycle of components and materials.
In particular, Fraunhofer IPK researchers can contribute their expertise in the development of digital twins and assistance systems for circular economy. This includes an as-is analysis of circularity in the aviation product lifecycle and the identification of stakeholder requirements and regulatory frameworks along the entire value chain. In addition, existing approaches for validation and evaluation of circularity will be analyzed and logics for economically and ecologically optimized decisions will be developed. Close cooperation with other initiatives such as IDTA and Catena-X e.V. is planned in order to link data models, develop interoperable solutions and map life cycle wide dependencies. The development of decision support applications for different processes in the aerospace industry and the evaluation of usability by SMEs are further focal points.

Applications and services:

Provision of basic services and standards for barrier-free interoperability in the data ecosystem.
Fraunhofer IPK identifies and integrates the ecosystem libraries and develops the requirements for the semantic descriptions and data space assets. This includes the analysis of integration mechanisms, the definition of interfaces and the investigation of infrastructure descriptions in the data space semantics.

The consortium

Lead:

  • Airbus Operations GmbH

Industry partners:

  • Diehl Aviation Laupheim GmbH
  • PRÄWEST Präzisionswerkstätten Dr.-Ing. Heinz-Rudolf Jung GmbH & Co. KG
  • Synergeticon GmbH
  • gemineers GmbH
  • Advanced-Materials-Concepts GmbH
  • toolcraft AG
  • ZAL GmbH

Technology partners:  

  • SAP SE
  • T-Systems International GmbH
  • SupplyOn AG
  • Capgemini Engineering Deutschland SAS & Co KG

Research partners:

  • Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR)
  • Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V.
  • and 16 associated partners from the aviation industry in Germany and Europe

Funding Notice

Funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (BMWK) under the funding code ID 13MX004A as part of the Manufacturing-X funding program.

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