Asset Administration Shells, Configuration, Code Generation: A power trio for Industry 4.0 Platforms

The development of intelligent solutions for manufacturing is a challenging task. Industry 4.0 platforms can provide a unifying layer here. However, flexible AI support, openness for evolving service and components from different vendors and adaptability to the diverse and changing requirements is required from such a platform to boost IIoT development. For this purpose, our approach combines - as a "power trio" - (1) wide use of Asset Administration Shells (AAS) for targeting device, component and service heterogeneity, with (2) configuration support for dealing with the diverse and changing requirements and (3) code generation for cost-effective creation of customer specific platform instances, AAS and AI-based Industry 4.0 applications on top of the IIP-Ecosphere platform. The platform has been implemented based on vertically scaled AAS and evaluated with two Industry 4.0 demonstrators. In this context, we discuss the experiences we made with our approach.