Beyond Silos: Building Trust and Accelerating CCAM Through Federated Data Sharing

Data sharing … A priori it sounds a bit risky… right? It’s almost a contradiction. Data is already recognised as the main asset of many industries and institutions. It’s said your product is only as good as your data. Data is the fuel that fosters innovation, from emerging AI training, test and benchmarking, to discovering patterns to steer development, and enabling traceability to avoid common pitfalls.

So, why share this precious gem, these data, with competitors? The first business thought is instinctive and opposite: protect the data, hide it behind a firewall in a cyber-secure bunker to prevent any leakage, any use that gives a competitive advantage to someone other than us.

But what if it’s time to start thinking that this “us” expands beyond ourselves, our organisation, our country, to encompass all of Europe? Because Europe faces a global competitive challenge that cannot be ignored for long. From this perspective, not sharing data seems counterproductive, even a failure. The real risk is that research and development projects, key to maintain European competitiveness, repeat experimentation, wasting valuable resources to just rediscover findings already found but not shared. This scenario prevents a pan-European orchestrated technological advance, rendering CCAM systems and services performances beyond each small “test site” an unknown and a risk that the market does not dare to assume. We are facing to a slow and fragmented advance, without solidity, without joint validation, without robust cooperation mechanisms that propel us forward cohesively.

Wouldn’t it be better if evaluation methodologies guided us in an aligned way to answer questions that make us all grow, together? Wouldn’t it be wiser to use financial and technical resources to investigate what we all, as a whole, haven’t yet explored, rather than duplicate efforts on already-solved-topics? Wouldn’t it be ideal for developing and validating new CCAM systems on the basis of a greatly varied and large set of data from the very beginning, fueling innovation on a scale that we can’t start to imagine?

Robust, secure, federated and trustworthy data sharing should be an obvious choice in any industrial environment, and even more in CCAM, where we have a unique opportunity before us to lead a consistent technological evolution.

Recently, I had the pleasure of participating in EUCAD 2025, in the session “Federated Data Sharing in CCAM – Test Data Space,” where we presented these concepts and discussed the immense potential and critical challenges of data sharing. The main technology basis is the Data Space, which is a federated, secure environment, based on common policies, rules, and standards, for the sovereign exchange of data, so that data providers retain control over their data, while sharing occurs within a network of trusted partners.

In the FAME project, we have focused on a demonstrator of the use of Data Spaces to facilitate the exchange of test data (such as sensor data and performance metrics) from CCAM in research activities on public roads. The path to the maturity of Data Spaces still presents challenges, such as the fragmentation of activities, the immaturity of the software ecosystem, and the uncertainty in mid/long term developments. These challenges imply that any implementation of Data Spaces must still be cautious and monitored, focusing the next steps of adoption of standards, consolidation of a technical base, while advancing in specific CCAM domain use cases.

This is the point where Data Spaces become more than just a technology; it is an enabler. By cooperating within these secure frameworks, we not only optimize valuable resources but also decisively propel innovation in CCAM. The road ahead demands collective commitment, a shared vision, and sustained effort, but the great reward is a more competitive Europe, leading the way with smarter roads and advanced mobility for all.

Written by Dr. Marcos Nieto, Head of Connected, Cooperative, and Automated Systems department at Vicomtech, Spain