Use cases for Manufacturing-X: Benefits of data spaces in industrial practice

Manufacturing-X aims to build federated data ecosystems to increase industrial resilience, sustainability, and competitiveness. However, while this ambition is clear, the concrete pathway to achieve it remains fragmented. To address this gap, this paper systematically analyzes five diverse, advanced use cases within a physical federated testbed. Our novel contribution lies in identifying that, despite the great diversity of these use cases, the underlying technological barriers to overcome are remarkably similar. Building on this key finding, we propose a unified ”meet in the middle” architectural framework. This strategy reconciles bottom-up operational technology (OT) realities with top-down IT intent. Ultimately, this use-case-agnostic approach enables a step-by-step implementation towards a scalable ecosystem, offering greater real-time capability and automation potential than conventional approaches.