In production, machines and facilities generate a huge amount of data that should and need to be managed and used by different actors. In the course of this development, the collection, exchange, linking and evaluation of data is becoming a new key competence. In order to promote this key competence and to enable the industry in the long term, GAIA-X will make a significant contribution. GAIA-X provides a digital ecosystem with standardized, interoperable interfaces that will enable companies to provide, merge and share data securely and confidently.

However, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Europe in particular are still critical towards cloud services. Reasons for this include, inter alia, a lack of trust in existing services, reluctance to high investment cost and a lack of specialists in the company as well as concerns about potential dependencies. In this context, companies should be enabled and motivated to open up to the GAIA-X ecosystem and thus realize positive synergy effects with their partners.

The challenges are not only technical; transformation needs are also raised with regard to the design of the business, the organization and processes when entering GAIA-X. Novel platform-based business models, new DevOps departments or data competencies, for instance, often present very similar challenges to SMEs. Thus, the objective of the URANOS-X project is to develop requirements, transferable solution patterns and methods for enabling manufacturing companies for GAIA-X. For this purpose, findings, experiences and best practices from already experienced companies and organizations (so-called leaders) are used and processed for companies just starting out (so-called learners). Furthermore, the findings will also be prepared for other social actors such as politics and associations (so-called listeners), so that a development kit is created in the project, which includes cross-domain solution patterns for a low-threshold entry into the GAIA-X world of companies.

GAIA-X, Maturity Models, Architecture Frameworks, Business Model Canvas, IEC 62559 Use Case Methodology.