Towards a Semantic Administrative Shell for Industry 4.0 Components

TLDR

In engineering and manufacturing, the shift toward digitized production is underway, yet how to implement it with concrete standards and technologies remains unclear. This paper proposes developing a Semantic I4.0 Component—a semantic-based Administrative Shell—to digitally represent all information about hardware or software objects and address communication and comprehension challenges in Industry 4.0. The authors extend the Administrative Shell concept by employing RDF, RDF Schema, and OWL to create a semantic digital representation of hardware and software objects. The approach is demonstrated in a real‑world use case, illustrating its benefits.

Abstract

In the engineering and manufacturing domain, there is currently an atmosphere of departure to a new era of digitized production. In different regions, initiatives in these directions are known under different names, such as industrie du futur in France, industrial internet in the US or Industrie 4.0 in Germany. While the vision of digitizing production and manufacturing gained much traction lately, it is still relatively unclear how this vision can actually be implemented with concrete standards and technologies. Within the German Industry 4.0 initiative, the concept of an Administrative Shell was devised to respond to these requirements. The Administrative Shell is planned to provide a digital representation of all information being available about and from an object which can be a hardware system or a software platform. In this paper, we present an approach to develop such a digital re presentation based on semantic knowledge representation formalisms such as RDF, RDF Schema and OWL. We present our concept of a Semantic I4.0 Component which addresses the communication and comprehension challenges in Industry 4.0 scenarios using semantic technologies. Our approach is illustrated with a concrete example showing its benefits in a real-world use case.