Towards a Digital Twin Platform for Industrie 4.0

Abstract

In an Industrie 4.0 (I4.0), rigid structures and architectures applied in manufacturing and industrial information technologies today, should be replaced by highly dynamic and self-organizing networks. Today's proprietary technical systems lead to strictly defined engineering processes and value chains. Interacting Digital Twins (DT) are considered an enabling technology that could help to increase flexibility based on semantically enriched information. Nevertheless, for interacting digital twins to become a reality, their implementation should be based on existing standards like the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). Additionally, DT Platforms could accelerate development, deployment and ensure resilient operation of DT. This paper presents such a platform based on a microservices architecture and offering solutions for continuous deployment, data infrastructure and I4.0 business services. The platform is evaluated in the use case scenarios platform-based manufacturing and collaborative condition monitoring. As a result, implemented AAS-based mi-croservices organize manufacturing, and submodels of the AAS enable cross-company data sharing for collaborative condition monitoring. Future work should focus on fault-management and service recovery, as well as integration of the AAS into lower platform layers, e.g. for improving data usage control.