Asset Adminstration Shell-based Flexible Manufacturing System

Within the era of Industry 4.0, Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) have been identified as a key technology that enables the flexible manufacturing system (FMS) and ultimately accelerates the manufacturing paradigm shift to mass customization and individualization. To address the challenges of the FMS, we propose an Asset Administration Shell (AAS)-based approach for information modeling of production processes and capabilities of role-based production equipment within a CPPS. On the one hand, our approach intends to decouple production processes from production resources and to decouple the functional roles of production resources from physical assets, which can ultimately increase production flexibility. On the other hand, the interoperable AAS-based information models facilitate both vertical integration within an enterprise and horizontal integration across the value chain, thereby enhancing flexibility. To implement this approach, a middleware-based IT architecture is introduced and demonstrated on a Festo demo workstation.