Knowledge4Retail (K4R) is an interdisciplinary research project set out to digitalize the stationary retail business. A number of different partners are collaborating to optimize two key factors of retail. First, the optimization of product placement inside the store to accelerate turnover and create a more personal shopping experience. Secondly, the process of optimizing and automating store internal logistics, from the arrival of new deliveries to the refilling of shelves. To achieve these goals various use cases were created, which are developed by the partners of the project.

The platform operates around a digital twin, which is a digital replica of a physical object and in this case a retail store. This dynamic database needs to be accessible by the use cases and components to fulfill their objective. The multitude of components accessing the diverse resources has to be controlled to assure information confidentiality and integrity. To enhance the platform’s security, data access control needs to be implemented.

This research analyzes the data flows of the various components of the system to create a foundation for a data access control concept for the K4R platform. The research’s insights are largely based on expert interviews, which were conducted to analyze the exact definitions of every component of the system as well as what the individual components of the project need to access. Furthermore, the focus lies on how employees of the supermarket should be able to access the digital twin’s information. This research uses role-based access control to define access roles for each component in the system based on their activity and what they should be allowed to access.

In the process, a UML component diagram is created to resemble the platform’s data flows as well as a UML class diagram to analyze the different resources of the digital twin. Com- bining the results from the diagrams, the roles are established, creating the desired elements of a data access control concept. The proposed elements build the foundation of a future im- plementation for access control on the K4R platform. Through this, a potential methodology for the creation of a role-based access control system for a complex interdisciplinary platform such as K4R is established.

In addition, the expert interviews are used to explore different hosting styles for the K4R system as well as the possibility of external parties accessing information of a supermarket’s K4R instance.