Asset Administration Shell Applications for manufacturing systems

The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is a digital representation of physical or non-physical assets. By means of submodels, it can provide data for different use cases and is thus becoming a basic technology for digital twins of Industrie 4.0. Many of these submodels are currently under development. However, this diversity is also a challenge: At present, it is still very time-consuming for factory operators as well as for device manufacturers and application developers to create a management shell together with submodels for assets. The existing tools are very powerful but require both detailed expertise regarding VWS and domain knowledge that is often not available at the same time. Vendors of professional IT solutions therefore often do not know which submodels are relevant for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to address important use cases and therefore cannot deliver appropriate tools. It is therefore important to understand which submodels address relevant use cases that justify investments in digitization. We have therefore examined numerous VWS implementation projects with SMEs and extracted submodels, as well as key elements of these submodels, that have emerged in these projects.