Live Collaboration in Engineering (LCE) builds on the results of the prostep ivip project group Collaborative Digital Twins (CDT), pursuing the goal of enabling synchronous, federated collaboration across the entire V-model. The initiative focuses on cross-company cooperation grounded in interconnected data, aligned semantics, and dataspace technologies.
LCE addresses real-world industrial use cases and establishes a methodological and technical framework that allows multiple partners to simultaneously access consistent engineering information — spanning requirements, systems engineering, simulation, integration, and testing. By combining use case definition, organizational governance, and technical implementation into one cohesive concept, LCE advances the CDT vision toward a scalable, interoperable, and future-ready engineering collaboration ecosystem.
The 2026 focus from a user perspective is on defining and validating practical use cases for live collaboration along the V-model. Users contribute concrete requirements from systems engineering, simulation, and integration & testing, while assessing the value of synchronous collaboration in terms of throughput time, quality, and transparency. Expected outcomes include elaborated use cases, ontologies, and well-founded assessments of the real-world benefits of dataspace-based collaboration in daily engineering environments.
For vendors and implementers, 2026 centers on deriving technical requirements from prioritized use cases — covering interfaces, semantics, ontologies, and integration concepts for existing engineering tools. Concrete deliverables include architecture blueprints, implementation options, and the prototypical realization of selected use cases within a shared demonstrator. The objective is to demonstrate interoperable, practice-ready solution concepts for live collaboration built on dataspace technologies.
Key challenges include aligning a shared understanding of "live collaboration," harmonizing existing models and ontologies, and integrating heterogeneous tool landscapes. On the organizational side, questions around roles, governance, IP protection, and accountability need to be addressed. Technically, the challenge lies in connecting dataspace concepts, semantics, and engineering tools in a way that enables scalable, high-performance, and practically viable live collaboration.
"With the completion of CDT, we established the conceptual and technical foundation for cross-company collaboration. With Live Collaboration in Engineering, we are now taking the next step: building on the CDT results, we are transferring the principles of synchronous, data-driven collaboration to additional engineering disciplines across the entire V-model."
– Dr. Jakob Trauer, :em engineering methods AG
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