Questions about EDC Connector usage in production environment

[wadahiro]

Hello,

Recently, I've been investigating how to make different companies share data using the EDC Connector. Thanks to Minimum Tractus-X Dataspace (MXD), I managed to exchange data between Alice and Bob on my local k8s cluster. However, I'm not sure how to use the EDC Connector in a real production environment. Could someone help me with the following questions?

In MXD, I exchanged data by using curl command to call the EDC Management API. In a real production environment, what's the expected way to call the EDC Management API?

• Is it expected that EDC Connector will be embedded in applications within each company to call the EDC Management API and perform operations from the application?
• Or, is it expected that each participating company develops own UI that manages the EDC Connector independently, ensuring it's not tightly connected to applications? In this case, in the eclipse-edc repository, there is a demo Connector UI called DataDashboard. Is it expected that this could be used as a basis for creating a management UI in Tractus-X? Or, is there a plan to provide a reference implementation of the EDC Connector UI in Tractus-X?

I'd appreciate any insights or guidance on this.