Integrated Data Model and Structure for the Asset Administration Shell in Industrie 4.0

The increasing demand for highly customized products in connection with shortened product life cycles requires the manufacturing industry to be eminently flexible, whereas low production costs are crucial to persist in the competition of the global markets. To meet this requirements, cyber-physical systems (CPS) are applied into the production process, aiming for interconnected and self-managing smart factories, which can incorporate external and internal conditions for the autonomous adaptation to gain optimized results. This is achieved through a bi-directional information flow between all important components such as machines, products, control programs and off-site assets. Therefore it is essential to standardize communication interfaces and enhance interoperability between CPS of all variations. This paper presents an approach to combine the specification of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with the guidelines of the Plattform Industrie 4.0 (I4.0), thus obtaining a uniform structure for industrial CPS. Based on the recommended asset administration shell for I4.0-components, the required functionality is identified and allocated to different segments. The five main segments include the functionality for security, representation, communication to external CPS, communication to internal assets and a section for additional applications to enhance the capabilities. By using a standardized protocol for the configuration and representation based on the object memory model of the W3C, a significant interoperability between I4.0-components and conventional Internet-of-Things can be realized. The proposed structure is applied in a use case to simulate the adaptation and remote maintenance of a production robot.