Mr. Kuhn, you have been working with partner companies since 2016 as part of the 'BaSys 4.0' research project to develop the open source middleware Eclipse BaSyx. You launched the first release in 2021. What can BaSyx do today, how can companies use the middleware for the introduction of Industry 4.0?

Dr. Thomas Kuhn : Interested companies can use the BaSyx middleware for their individual use case at any time - and are doing so. So we are really talking about companies that have already fully integrated the technology into their production. The technology is also available to them as open source. We have also taken special care to make it modular, so that each company can take the components it needs from the 'construction kit'. What we are currently still working on is further improving the integration of BaSyx into existing systems and optimizing the data flows.

You now also want to explicitly address SMEs. Who has used BaSyx to date and how do you quantify the response so far?

Dr. Kuhn: Let's put it this way: the companies that are already using BaSyx are still often early adopters, i.e. companies that are very interested in the technology per se. Over the years, a considerable number of software downloads have been made - we are currently talking about 116,000 downloads. Nevertheless, to be honest, we have to say that BaSyx's application potential is far from exhausted.

What approach to the topic would you recommend to interested parties from SMEs in particular?

Dr. Kuhn: As a first step, it is very helpful if companies can inform themselves as simply and easily as possible about the possibilities offered by the use of BaSyx. In this case, we have set up the Eclipse BaSyx Open Hour, a kind of open digital consultation hour where our experts take time once a month to answer questions from the community. The Open Hour always takes place on the first Friday morning of each month and is free of charge.

What did you show in terms of BaSyx at this year's Hannover Messe?

Dr Kuhn: We used a demonstrator to show how a fully digitalized and flexible factory can be implemented with the help of digital twins and administration shells. In other words, it was about the concrete application of BaSyx - in a miniature chocolate factory.

What are the next development steps?

Dr. Kuhn : The third research project in this series, 'BaSys4Transfer', was launched in November last year. The two previous funded projects 'BaSys 4.0' and 'BaSys 4.2' were successfully completed. The current research project is now about implementing a virtual engineering environment. We will create a virtual factory that will enable employees in the factories to deal with the overall topic in a much closer and clearer way. In the long term, the digitalization of production in an individual company is just the beginning; the next step will be digital supply chains. In addition to digitalization, this also requires data rooms that allow data to be shared while ensuring that the owners of the data have control over its use at all times. To make this possible, we are working with our partners to integrate BaSyx with data room platforms such as Gaia-X.