September 28, 2023 -  The European Gaia-X initiative aims to create a safe infrastructure for data spaces by bringing together industry participants, universities and research institutions as well as the public sector in a public-private partnership. Continental has an active role within Gaia-X’s mobility projects.  

Forming a European safe space for data across industries  

Gaia-X is a European initiative to establish the next generation of secure and federated European dataspaces that meet the highest standards of digital sovereignty and promotes innovation within and across industries. The goal is to form open, interoperable, and transparent digital ecosystems where companies and users can share and use data and services in a trustworthy manner.  

Within this initiative, national Gaia-X hubs and Lighthouse projects, like Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility, are working within concrete domains to advance the Gaia-X goals for those specific industries. For example, the Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility project family focuses on future mobility applications and provides the framework for new applications, such as parking or road condition monitoring, for transforming the mobility sector. About 80 participants from all areas of application and research within mobility, especially information and communication technologies, are involved. Continental is strongly represented, where we are participating in five out of six projects:    

• Gaia-X 4 AGEDA (Requirements and Application of GAIA-X in the Edge Device Automobile)  
  Designing a software architecture that enables vehicles to function as edge devices, facilitating data-driven applications and the seamless adaptation of vehicle functions throughout the vehicle's entire lifespan.  

• Gaia-X 4 KI (Artificial Intelligence)  
  Establishing a data and services ecosystem for the training and validation of AI applications.  

• Gaia-X 4 moveID (Decentralized digital vehicle identities in the highly networked traffic environment)  
  Creation of a decentralized data and service ecosystem for the integration of automated and connected vehicles with intelligent infrastructures, 3rd party services (e.g. content providers) or innovative services around the automated and connected vehicle, taking into account the design principles of Gaia-X.  

• Gaia-X 4 AMS (Advanced Mobility Services)  
  Creating and operating a dataspace which provides developed advanced mobility services.  

• Gaia-X 4 PLC-AAD (Product Life Cycle – Across Automated Driving)  
  Creating and operating a dataspace to support the product life cycle of automated driving functions.  

GAIA-X is building dataspaces for the Automotive industry  

The demand for customized experiences across various channels and interactions is reshaping how the automotive industry handles data management, consequently impacting the future of the architecture of vehicle software. In order to fully implement the software-defined vehicle and to enable the AI applications that will dominate future mobility, we have to break down the data silos and enable not just collaboration, but implementation of third-party content. With Gaia-X’s decentralized approach, the structure and architecture for an automotive dataspace can be created while clarifying important legal questions so that business in this space can be done in a trustworthy way.