Mission Digital Twin - Asset Administration Shell (AAS) realized by Open Source

Presented by Thiago Weber Martins (SAP SE) and Christian Mosch (Industrial Digital Twin Association) at EclipseCon 2022.

It is no surprise that Open Source plays an essential role to establish the necessary de-facto standards and drive the adoption of new Technologies like the Industrial Digital Twin. The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is the model with the highest degree of maturity for mapping product and process information across the entire lifecycle of industrial goods. To ensure that, members of the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA) are actively involved in open-source-implementing of the AAS.

In this session, we will present the activities of the IDTA that lead to the creation of Eclipse Digital Twin Top-Level project and its corresponding projects. Focus will be on how we are embracing the Open Source as a development approach to thrive co-innovation and drive the technology for Industrial Digital Twins.

The Eclipse Digital Twin Top-Level Project provides a space for open source projects to produce implementations and increase adoption of solutions, prototypes and supporting software to build and consume information from digital twins. Standardized metamodels, data models with homogenized semantics and standardized APIs are crucial to ensure interoperability with respect to the information shared and exchanged between digital twins and applications. The Eclipse Digital Twin Top-Level Project supports the ecosystem orchestrated by the IDTA.

Currently, the Eclipse Digital Twin Top-Level Project consists of the following projects:

Eclipse AASX Package Explorer is a viewer / editor for the Asset Administration Shell. Eclipse AASX Package Explorer is a tool with graphical user interface meant for experimenting and demonstrating the potential of Asset Administration Shells targeting tech-savvy and less technically-inclined users.
Eclipse AAS Model for Java (AAS4J) implements the specification of the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) such as metamodels, submodels, serialization and deserialization modules, validators, and transformation libraries based on the AAS specifications.
Eclipse AAS Web Client is a viewer and client for interaction with Asset Administration Shell information models.
Eclipse BaSyx is the open source Industry 4.0 middleware realizing all necessary standards and infrastructure components for Industry 4.0 production environments and provide the foundation for software platforms.
Our session addresses attendees without any specific background knowledge on the topic. Attendees will learn more about the fundamentals of Industry 4.0 as well as of Digital Twin Technology. Especially, the attendees will be able to get insights on the motivation why Open Source is crucial for increasing the adopting of standards like the AAS to implement the Industrial Digital Twins.

Note: A dedicated session will present the Eclipse BaSyx (https://www.eclipsecon.org/2022/sessi....