Progress, demonstrations and a clear view of the next steps - project meeting at ifak in Magdeburg

In March 2025, the partners of the ESCOM project met at the ifak – Institut für Automation und Kommunikation e.V. in Magdeburg for a regular dialogue. The focus was on current developments, technical challenges and the coordination of further work steps, such as energy optimisation of the edge cloud ecosystem, improved monitoring of machine components and sovereign data exchange.

What is currently being worked on

A key topic was the question: How much power and computing power do certain digital applications need? To find this out, so-called ‘application scenarios’ were discussed for the component manufacturers' application examples. These scenarios are to be tested using the use cases in order to draw conclusions about power consumption and memory usage by means of measurement recordings and subsequently optimise the edge cloud ecosystems.

Another topic was analysing the energy requirements of algorithms based on artificial intelligence. The different technologies used are to be analysed in terms of their power consumption so that the technologies can be classified in terms of their energy requirement-benefit ratio.

The question of where the algorithms should be executed was also important: directly on the machine on edge computers or in the cloud. The correct distribution of the individual applications on the computing side helps to work as efficiently and resource-efficiently as possible.

Which digital components are used

Various digital services are used in the project, for example:

• Blockchain-Servicesto ensure data integrity,
• component serviceswhich enable the processing of the measurement data,
• data bases and IoT platformsfor data storage and analysis.

Depending on the end user's situation, a decision is made as to whether these services are used on site or in the cloud.

The collected data is exchanged via a sovereign data and service ecosystem in a standardised format. The data model is determined by the use of the Asset Administration Shell (AAS).

Insight into the practice

The meeting concluded with a tour of ifak's technical centre and a vivid demonstration of the results achieved so far by Melanie Stolze and her team. They showed how a so-called component service can be used in combination with a DSÖ to check the condition of a component or calculate its remaining service life (RUL).

A digital description of the service was used (a so-called ‘blueprint’), which was offered to the user in the form of an AAS via a DSÖ by the component manufacturer. This service receives measured component data, analyses it and returns the result in the AAS of the service - an example of how digital services can be exchanged securely and transparently between companies in the future.

Melanie Stolze summarised it like this:
‘Such scenarios show how the combination of interoperable data descriptions, sovereign data ecosystems and advancing algorithms can enable new forms of collaboration between service providers and users - securely and traceably.’