During the period from 1 July 2019 to 30 September 2022, the BaSys 4.2 project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under grant 01IS19022F, focused on consolidating the Eclipse BaSyx open‑source initiative and establishing a broader Industry 4.0 community. The Eclipse Foundation Europe GmbH acted as the project lead, providing governance, intellectual‑property due diligence, and community support. Collaboration with the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA) led to the creation of the Eclipse Top‑Level Project “Digital Twin”, which now hosts BaSyx alongside other IDTA projects such as the AASX Package Explorer and the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) model.
Technically, BaSyx serves as a reference implementation of the BaSys middleware. The project’s milestones included migrating the source code from the Eclipse Git/Gerrit infrastructure to a dedicated Eclipse GitHub organization, which lowered the entry barrier for new developers and users. A comprehensive redesign and relocation of the BaSyx project website followed, improving visibility and documentation. The most significant technical achievement was the release of version 1.0 in 2021. This major release marked the completion of the Eclipse Foundation’s governance and IP processes, including rigorous license checks for both internal code and external libraries. Release reviews conducted jointly by the Foundation and project maintainers ensured transparency and adherence to open‑source best practices, thereby guaranteeing that BaSyx remains maintainable, extensible, and available beyond the research period.
Community building was a core focus. BaSyx was represented at every EclipseCon from 2019 to 2021, where workshops on “Open Source Industry 4.0” and “Implement Industry 4.0 with Eclipse BaSyx” were held. The project also organized webinars under the “Open Research Webinars” series, featuring talks such as “Making Industry 4.0 easy with Eclipse BaSyx” by Fraunhofer IESE. These events attracted participants from academia and industry, fostering knowledge exchange and encouraging contributions. The migration to GitHub, the 1.0 release, and the website relaunch collectively expanded the developer community and increased the adoption of BaSyx as a vendor‑neutral, open‑source solution for digital twins.
The BaSys 4.2 report, authored by Marco Jahn of the Eclipse Foundation Europe GmbH, was published on 28 March 2023. It documents the project’s progress, the technical outcomes, and the collaborative framework that enabled the transition from a research prototype to a stable, community‑driven open‑source platform. The Digital Twin Top‑Level Project now serves as a hub for the growing Industry 4.0 open‑source ecosystem, ensuring that the BaSyx implementation and related tools remain accessible and evolve in line with industry needs.