Due to the great freedom of design, additive manufacturing (AM) offers enormous potential for lightweight design. In order to harness this potential, it is crucial to integrate knowledge between the individual stages of the AM value chain. By linking AM with digitization of process and product data, lightweight design and production can be further optimized in economic and ecological terms.

The use case discussed here describes a designer who optimizes an original cast component made of AlSi10Mg with regard to lightweight design by means of topology optimization for AM. A process specific topology optimization algorithm provides an optimized design with knowledge about the best suited combination of AM-machine, process parameters, heat treatment and surface treatment. As input for this design algorithm, provision of material data is required in an automatized manner, e.g. mechanical material parameters, component data from conventional production, as well as AM data such as process-related tolerances. Since AM value chains are often distributed, cross-institutional data sharing is inevitable and decentralized data and knowledge islands must be made available, integrated and analyzed as a network of linked data while maintaining highest data sovereignty standards.

To meet this need, a data space architecture based on the International Data Spaces (IDS) reference architecture model is designed that describes the participants, their roles and interactions, as well as the necessary technological components. In this first implementation of the Materials Data Space®, the Dataspace Connector is used and serves as technological access point to the data space. Process and material data are modeled and linked using semantic web technologies, such as ontologies, knowledge graphs and federated SPARQL queries. A concept and implementation for an interface between the process specific topology optimization and the data space is proposed. An exemplary evaluation demonstrates how cross-institutional data sharing elevates the virtual design of AM-components.