Declarative Policy Control for Data Spaces: A DSL-Based Approach for Manufacturing-X

TL;DR

This paper introduces a DSL-based method enabling domain experts in manufacturing to declaratively specify and enforce fine-grained, context-dependent data sharing policies in federated data spaces, enhancing data governance without requiring software engineering skills.

Contribution

It presents a novel domain-specific language approach for declarative policy specification in manufacturing data spaces, bridging the gap between domain expertise and technical policy enforcement.

Findings

Enables human-readable, machine-executable policy definitions

Supports context-dependent data access restrictions

Facilitates automatic policy enforcement in manufacturing ecosystems

Abstract

The growing adoption of federated data spaces, such as in the GAIA-X and the International Data Spaces (IDS) initiative, promises secure and sovereign data sharing across organizational boundaries in Industry 4.0. In manufacturing ecosystems, this enables use cases, such as cross-factory process optimization, predictive maintenance, and supplier integration. Frameworks and standards, such as the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), Eclipse Dataspace Connector (EDC), ID-Link and Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) provide a strong foundation to realize this ecosystem. However, a major open challenge is the practical description and enforcement of context-dependent data usage policies using these base technologies - especially by domain experts without software engineering backgrounds. Therefore, this article proposes a method for leveraging domain-specific languages (DSLs) to enable declarative, human-readable, and machine-executable policy definitions for sovereign data sharing via data space connectors. The DSL empowers domain experts to specify fine-grained data governance requirements - such as restricting access to data from specific production batches or enforcing automatic deletion after a defined retention period - without writing imperative code.