Integration of asset administration shell and Web of Things

Abstract

In the course of the digital transformation of industrial production processes, physical assets are encapsulated with software components, where a set of such computing entities working in unison form and build the cyber-physical systems (CPS). The Platform Industry 4.0 (PI4.0) provides a standardized meta-model in terms of submodels and submodel elements to digitally represent information about an asset. The submodels are used to represent a wide range of information like the asset nameplate, administrative aspects, technical specifications and even the accessibility information. Some of these data have to be acquired from the asset. The W3C Web of Things provides the Thing Description meta-model to represent the accessibility runtime information of these assets. This paper aims to map the W3C Web of Thing (WoT) Thing Description (TD) to the submodel and the submodel elements of the PI4.0 Asset Administration Shell (AAS). A standard submodel template encapsulating each of the Thing Description classes would be the outcome of this paper and also a plugin module embedded into the AAS package explorer that utilizes this template to automatically generate AAS submodel representation from TD for any given asset. This paper also presents a brief description of a use-case consisting of a Delta Robot which can be accessed via an OPC UA server.