The "Silicon Economy" project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport Affairs (BMDV) with 25 million euros, is bearing fruit: the first open source components of the logistics operating system for the platform economy of the future are now being delivered. Companies can now use freely available software and hardware and adapt it to their needs.

On April 7, 2022, results from a total of five development projects were made available in a digital library, the so-called repository, of the Open Logistics Foundation. The foundation pursues the goal of anchoring open source in logistics. The source code of the developments is now freely available and can be further developed by companies and adapted to their needs.

"We want to make our country more modern and digital. With this project, we are setting new international standards for logistics. Our goal is to digitalize all business processes along the supply chain - from ordering and transport planning to invoicing. Germany is a pioneer here. With the Open Logistics Foundation's digital library, we are opening up our collected data to companies worldwide. With digitalized import processes, we are increasing the ability to plan, reducing bureaucracy and lowering transport costs," said Dr Volker Wissing, Federal Minister for Digital and Transport Affairs.

Who will be the first to lift the data gold?

Prof. Michael ten Hompel, Managing Director of the Fraunhofer IML, emphasizes: "With our Silicon Economy project, we have set out to build something like the Linux for logistics. The first foundation stone for a new type of decentralized platform ecosystem in logistics has now been laid with the publication of our first open source components. Logistics is increasingly being shaped by digitalization and artificial intelligence. Now it's time to decide who will be the first to mine the much-cited data gold and launch the right algorithms. With the Open Logistics Foundation, we have an environment in which interfaces and basic processes are standardized and applicable and an open, federated and sovereign data space is being created. Companies can now develop intelligent solutions for digital consignment notes or pallet tracking. Companies are already rethinking: They know that a joint effort is needed and that open source is essential for the digitalization and automation of logistics. We are therefore convinced that the ecosystem of providers and users will grow rapidly."

In the coming weeks and months, further components from the Silicon Economy will be added to the repository. In addition, the Open Logistics Foundation's industry partners are now also launching their own initial projects, the results of which will be made freely available via the repository.

The published components

The published components include, for example, a service for generating, storing and forwarding digital waybills in human- and machine-readable format, designed in accordance with established templates and international standards and implemented as a reference implementation. Other components offer solutions for the integration of IoT devices and the preparation of data for use by other services, as well as for the digitalization of import processes in air freight fresh logistics. The "IDS Integration Toolbox" software library also simplifies the integration of components for International Data Spaces (IDS) into IT systems. This benefits small and medium-sized companies in particular: They no longer have to rely on specialists with special knowledge of the IDS reference architecture model to connect to the secure data spaces.

All components are published under the free Open Logistics License, which takes European liability and copyright law into account.