Towards Industrie 4.0 compliant configuration of condition monitoring services

One of the many opportunities Industrie 4.0 (I4.0) offers, is to reduce (re-)configuration effort. Today, a variety of vendor-specific information models prevents an efficient configuration of Condition Monitoring (CM) for adaptable Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS). The manual configuration of signals that should be monitored is a tedious and error-prone task. Standardization efforts for I4.0 focus on a generic interface called Asset Administration Shell (AAS), which could increase configuration efficiency. The AAS should represent information, e.g. about components, machines, and plants, based on properties standardized according to IEC 61360. Although frequently used in planning and procurement, benefits of properties for the integration of CPPS have not yet been demonstrated. Additionally, important details for the implementation of the AAS, e.g. its deployment and technical requirements, have not yet been specified. In this paper, an information model for condition monitoring of a servo motor is defined based on IEC 61360 properties. This information model is included in an AAS that is implemented on the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) of a work cell from the company Lenze. The PLC communicates with a condition monitoring service via OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). Using IEC 61360 properties the type of a servo synchronous motor can be identified and thresholds for this motor can be configured without manual configuration effort. Nevertheless, in order to implement the AAS in an I4.0 compliant way, IT-Security and Message-based I4.0 communication have to be supported by the PLC. The effort for the (re-)configuration of condition monitoring services can be reduced based on IEC 61360 properties. The approach introduced in this work could help to achieve the main goals of I4.0: To improve the flexibility and efficiency of adaptable CPPS. Nevertheless, more properties and information models have to be standardized in the future.