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

2025-11-27

AI Summary

To address the challenge that domain experts—lacking software engineering expertise—struggle to flexibly define and enforce context-sensitive data usage policies within manufacturing data spaces, this paper proposes a declarative policy control approach based on a domain-specific language (DSL). The DSL combines high human readability with machine parsability, enabling experts to model fine-grained data governance policies—including access control, usage constraints, and automated deletion—without writing code, while ensuring automatic policy enforcement. The technical framework integrates internationally recognized standards: Asset Administration Shell (AAS), Eclipse Dataspace Connector (EDC), ID-Link, and OPC UA, thereby achieving contextual awareness. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the approach significantly enhances the usability, security, and cross-organizational collaboration efficiency of sovereign data sharing in industrial settings.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Description Logics

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

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.

Problem

• Enables declarative policy control for data sharing in federated data spaces.
• Addresses context-dependent data usage policy description and enforcement challenges.
• Empowers domain experts to define fine-grained data governance without coding.

Innovation

• DSL enables declarative policy definitions
• Human-readable machine-executable data governance
• Domain experts specify policies without coding