MoDIPharm: Modular Dataspace for Innovation in Industry 4.0 and Pharma 4.0

Name of participant: Rene Fischer

Project’s name: MoDIPharm: Modular Dataspace for Innovation in Industry 4.0 and Pharma 4.0

Project description:

Pharmaceutical manufacturers currently face several structural challenges driven by changing market dynamics, volatile supply chains, and the growing need for personalized medicine. To adapt, production environments must become more flexible, transparent, and traceable. Industry 4.0 concepts like industrial dataspaces and Digital Twins offer a way to build data-driven architectures, but putting them into practice remains difficult. Most manufacturing facilities still operate with fragmented IT and OT software landscapes, relying on manual, paper-based, or PDF-driven engineering and documentation workflows.
An easy example is adding new physical assets into an existing or new plant. When new machinery, pumps, or sensors are integrated, teams must spend considerable time manually copying technical metadata into separate local software systems. This disconnected process often creates “dark data” – information that exists within the organization but remains siloed, unmapped, and unusable for routine maintenance or long-term operational tracking.
Large-scale industrial initiatives such as Manufacturing-X have already demonstrated how standardized approaches like the Asset Administration Shell (AAS, IEC 63278) can resolve these issues by acting as a universal standard for secure data exchange. The initial step within this architecture is to populate the digital shell with static data, such as digital Nameplates or Handover Documentation. However, this structure is fundamentally scalable; over time, more and more “books” will be added to this virtual bookshelf to include submodels for automation, quality, simulation, and many other operational areas.
MoDIPharm’s main objective is to transfer these proven concepts to create a concrete baseline for data exchange that all partners along the pharmaceutical value chain can easily use and adapt for their own needs. By connecting established Industry 4.0 infrastructure frameworks with the specific, strict requirements of the pharmaceutical sector, MoDIPharm evaluates how a federated network architecture can support standardized, machine-readable asset data to establish a shared digital foundation across the industry, aiming for the “Pharma Open Data Space”.

Software Campus Partner: Fraunhofer ICT Group & Merck KGaA

Implementation period: 01.01.2026 – 31.12.2027