FactDAG: Formalizing Data Interoperability in an Internet of Production

Privacy-Preserving Production Process Parameter Exchange

“…Today, companies already collect much process information [44], i.e., they own data that is potentially also relevant for other companies. However, the lack of suitable data security mechanisms, missing opportunities to gain benefits from sharing data, and the fear of leaking sensitive business secrets, i.e., information leaking know-how of a company, manifests the existing silo mentality [33,72]. Simply making all information freely accessible is no option in competitive environments.…”

“…The most crucial properties directly follow from the competitive environment. As companies are notoriously cautious [72], they intend to only share specifically requested datasets [33] while preserving long-term security [13], i.e., data requests must be specified precisely. Consequentially, a global catalog of existing data or a way to browse available data items must not exist.…”

“…In theory, sharing such data could be especially useful for quick adjustments to address customer change requests [56] or the cheaper commissioning of production lines [61]. Still, plenty of information is only retained locally [44], i.e., stored in data silos [33], hindering the entirety of companies to profit from already analyzed parameters.…”

“…Novel concepts, such as the Internet of Production (IoP) [33,55], propose to further facilitate collaborations to utilize external knowledge. However, these advances are hindered by the lack of suitable solutions that consider industry needs [40], i.e., a prevention of sensitive information leakage on data provider as well as on the client-side and a valuable reward for providing data.…”

“…Moreover, we consider the already outlined industry needs, i.e., data provider privacy to not leak any confidential information within the shared data as well as client privacy to not reveal any future or current business plans through submitted requests, and a proper reward system to instigate companies to exchange their valuable data. Thereby, our platform facilitates the privacy-preserving exchange of production data in various domains and enables novel use cases, e.g., as introduced by the IoP, and unlocks new business models for participating data-providing companies as the value of data is widely acknowledged [33,40,56,69].…”