Design and implementation of a data space application architecture for sovereign engineering collaboration

Collaborative product development across organizations is frequently challenged by heterogeneous IT landscapes, organization-bounded Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems, and insufficient trust in data exchange. These issues are especially critical in early design phases, where secure and seamless exchange of sensitive engineering data is essential. This paper presents a data space architecture designed to address these challenges. Building on these conceptual foundations, a prototype of a federated co-design application has been implemented, leveraging emerging data space technologies to enable secure and interoperable collaboration. This application follows Gaia-X principles and combines several key components: the Eclipse Dataspace Connector for secure and policy-based data exchange, the Open Digital Rights Language for machine-readable usage rules designed for contractual embedding, and the Asset Administration Shell for standardized asset representation. The architecture enables traceable workflows, granular access control, and semantic interoperability between distributed PLM systems, without centralizing data. By ensuring both technical interoperability and legal compliance, the platform shows how data spaces can support scalable, trusted, and sovereign co-design across organizations, and contributes a transferable architecture pattern that links co-design requirements to concrete data-space mechanisms. The prototype was evaluated by industry experts, providing valuable insights for future developments in this domain and clarifying how data-space concepts can be operationalized in early life-cycle co-design settings.