Use Cases
EU Battery Regulation · ESPR · Catena-X / Manufacturing-X
Manufacturing: Federated supply chain data sharing without competitive exposure
EU regulation now requires manufacturers to share supply chain and carbon footprint data across thousands of partners. The federated data space model, implemented through open standards like IDS (International Data Spaces) and tools like Eclipse Tractus-X, lets manufacturers share precisely the data required, without exposing competitive production knowledge to a central platform. Apeiro provides the open infrastructure foundation that makes this model operational at scale.
The challenge today
Several EU regulations now require manufacturers to share data across their supply chains. The EU Battery Regulation mandates a digital product passport that tracks materials and carbon footprint from raw material to end of life. ESPR (Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation) extends digital product passport requirements across a broad range of product categories, making supply chain traceability a cross-sector obligation beyond batteries. Industry data spaces like Catena-X and Manufacturing-X require carbon footprint and quality data to flow between vehicle manufacturers and their supplier tiers.
A precision parts manufacturer faces a genuine dilemma: they are legally required to share specific data with customers up the supply chain, but sharing that data through a centralised platform means their production parameters, cycle times, and process knowledge could be visible to competitors or accessible to the platform operator. Their process knowledge is their competitive advantage.
Building and maintaining bilateral integrations with each customer is expensive and creates fragile, non-standard pipelines. The result is that many smaller suppliers are simultaneously under regulatory pressure to share data and structurally unable to do so in a way that protects their interests.
What becomes possible with Apeiro
The International Data Spaces architecture, which underpins both Catena-X and the broader Manufacturing-X initiative, lets manufacturers share precisely the data they choose, governed by machine-readable policies that travel with the data itself. Eclipse Tractus-X, the open-source reference implementation of these IDS connectors and protocols, provides the verified components that make this governance technically enforceable rather than contractually assumed.
The IDS connectors in Eclipse Tractus-X run on infrastructure managed by Apeiro’s components. IronCore handles the bare-metal layer at each supplier’s own facility or edge location, managing hardware lifecycle through Kubernetes-native APIs without requiring the supplier to operate conventional cloud infrastructure. Gardener provisions the Kubernetes clusters that run the connectors, consistently, across any participating supplier regardless of their existing IT environment. openMCP manages the declarative configuration of connectors across the supplier network via a GitOps workflow. When a regulatory reporting requirement changes, the configuration update propagates to all affected connectors from a single source of truth.
OCM (Open Component Model) records which version of each Tractus-X connector component is deployed to which supplier relationship as a signed, versioned delivery artifact. The software supply chain for the data space itself is therefore auditable: a regulator or customer can verify not just what data was shared, but that the connector doing the sharing was the certified, unmodified version.
ORD (Open Resource Discovery) and the UMS (Unified Metadata Service) extend the data space’s discoverability. Suppliers publish what data products they can provide (carbon footprint records, quality certificates, traceability attestations) as ORD-described metadata. The Knowledge Graph builds a semantic representation across the entire supplier network, making it possible for customer systems and AI agents to discover available data and compose queries across thousands of participants without manual pre-integration work.
A scenario
An automotive supplier needs to provide battery traceability data to three different customers, each with slightly different reporting requirements. IDS-based Tractus-X connectors are deployed on IronCore-managed infrastructure at the supplier’s own facility and configured through openMCP’s GitOps pipeline. Each connector shares precisely the required fields with the correct recipient under machine-readable governance policies; the supplier’s production parameters are never exposed. OCM records which connector version is running for each customer relationship: the audit trail for regulatory compliance is always current. When the EU Battery Regulation reporting schema is updated, openMCP propagates the configuration change to all three connectors simultaneously.
Apeiro is an open reference architecture — a collection of components and blueprints. Realising this scenario requires industry-specific knowledge, engineering investment, and integration expertise. Explore the technical foundations
