Not always obvious to users (and customers) of their products at first glance, today's products are largely assisted in their day-to-day use by a wide range of digital capabilities. Relating to the product itself (e.g. warranty offers, repair recommendations, etc.) as well as direct added value through real-time information on the current usage status. To be able to implement these in the future transparently and comprehensibly for the user, data spaces are one of the central points when it comes down to providing IT-infrastructure for products, services, and business models. Gaia-X-based data spaces are increasingly coming into focus here, especially regarding regulations and political guidelines for the collection, storage and use of data, such as the EU Data Act adopted within the European Union. This also brings new challenges for today's engineering data management systems. This contribution addresses those challenges and discusses the potentials in this context. Furthermore, it shows the technical implementation within an engineering data management system to participate as a component manufacturer in such data ecosystems compliant to Gaia-X principles in the context of product engineering. Subsequently brought into industrial application within the digital transformation of GMN as a German mechanical engineering company.

Sustainability is one of the key challenges of our time. With regard to products and their development, there are currently a large number of approaches that deal with the various aspects of sustainability in the sense of the circular economy with the identification, avoidance and optimization of environmental impacts under disruptive influences. This is also already being discussed intensively at various levels in politics. Directives such as the EU's Green Deal are one example that particularly addresses the reduction of harmful environmental impacts and the promotion of a circular economy. Approaches such as Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) or the Digital Product Passport (DPP) are intended to provide customers and users with a tool to support purchasing decisions by taking these sustainability and circularity-oriented aspects into account. The data-based implementation and support of such approaches presents companies and suppliers with challenges around technical documentation. Particularly in the case of heterogeneous and globally distributed value chains, companies face highly complex challenges when creating the relevant documentation to comply with the guidelines. This article deals with the Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) as the first step and part of an Environmental Product Declaration and focuses in particular the integration and export of corresponding footprint data and documents across company boundaries along the value chain using Asset Administration Shell approaches. An industrially implemented use case is used to demonstrate a systematic structure in a modular and platform-based sustainable data integration approach using CONTACT Software platform technology.

Smart digital products and the resulting ecosystems are already enabling companies to create disruptive new digital business models today and will do so even more so in the future. Digital twins are one of the key technologies in the realization of such business models. In most cases, digital twins are already created in the early product development/engineering phases and continue to develop over the lifetime of the product. Particularly in engineering, there is already an intensive exchange of different parts of the digital twin within and across company boundaries (for example, between component manufacturers and system providers all the way to the customer/operator). This usually leads to different IT ecosystems for different stakeholders and industries. Standardized exchange of data is therefore essential to ensure a secure, trustworthy and efficient exchange of data within the enterprise IT and the value chain. This is where the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) comes to play. Using the example of a data management system, this contribution illustrates the various applications inside and outside the enterprise engineering IT of the Asset Administration Shell (e.g. import and export of Assets via Gaia-X-compliant data spaces or also just file-based) and discusses the respective use cases in more detail using concrete examples from projects funded by the BMBF, BMWK, EIT Manufacturing and the EU. The implementation of the use cases will be shown based on the engineering data management platform technology from CONTACT Software.