Integrating Third-Party Asset Monitoring Applications in an Edge Architecture using the Asset Administration Shell

As malfunctioning devices may lead to expensive plant downtimes or to severe safety risks, monitoring of industrial plants and their devices is a crucial task. There are many providers for device monitoring solutions on the market. However, integrating third-party monitoring approaches into real industrial systems, especially for time-critical data, is complicated due to mismatching APIs and different parties using different formats for specifying the involved assets and data. This leads to expensive, time-taking, and error-prone manual work. In this paper, we present an edge-computing-based approach to integrate monitoring functionality in an industrial IoT system. It addresses the presented challenges by combining edge computing with an Industry 4.0 information modeling and access format, the Asset Administration Shell.