“Circularity only scales when product and process data can be shared across companies”

Mr. Pethig, Circularity has become a top priority in manufacturing. What’s fundamentally changing right now?

Florian Pethig: At Fraunhofer IOSB we see a shift from voluntary initiatives to an operational requirement. Companies must increasingly report carbon footprints, material origins and compliance across the lifecycle. The bottleneck is fragmented data: if information stays locked in disconnected systems across suppliers, machine builders and factory operators, sustainability remains a reporting task, not a controllable performance lever.

If data fragmentation is the bottleneck, what does it take to make production circular and sustainable?

Two things must come together: sovereign data exchange and standardized information models. Data spaces such as Factory-X aim to enable interoperable, rule-based data sharing between factory equipment suppliers and their customers, and they also address use cases like circular economy and energy consumption/ load management. On top of that, digital twins and digital product passports must be machine-readable and standards-based. That is why we develop the FA³ST ecosystem: an open, modular tool landscape to create, validate, host and share Asset Administration Shells efficiently, including within trusted data spaces. Our open-source AASPortal integrates asset data from distributed systems and offers context-specific views − for example, to display digital product passports.

How does this connect sustainability with resilience, both in supply chains and on the shopfloor?

Circular strategies require options: alternative suppliers, routes and processing paths, evaluated against time, cost, quality and sustainability criteria. Open architectures like the ones we realized in the Smart Factory Web or in Catena-X and Factory-X show how supply chains can become more resilient while integrating sustainability constraints.

And inside the factory, automation makes the biggest difference when energy, resources and quality are controlled together in real time. In Smart-E-Factory, for example, we combine AI with modern factory energy concepts and use digital twins to create transparency in energy management—so improvements become measurable and repeatable.

What will decide whether these approaches reach broad adoption, especially among SMEs?

Pethig: Lowering entry barriers. Companies need practical pathways to understand standards, test them with real assets and integrate them safely. That is why we complement R&D with enablement − through Transfer-X and handson data space workshops in our research factory environments, for example − so SMEs can move from concepts to implementation without betting everything on a one-off pilot.
 

Florian Pethig is the spokesperson for the Automation and Digitilization business unit and head of the Digital Infrastructure department (DIS) at Fraunhofer IOSB-INA.