Implementing Industry 4.0 Asset Administrative Shells in Mini Factories

Physical assets in manufacturing, can be: machines, sensors, actuators and in general everything that can be part of the plant and its processes. In such domain, the search for “agility” has come to be one of the most requested features. As a result, considerable research has been conducted to design manufacturing systems which embody manufacturing flexibility. It is in this context where the evolution of the supply-chain based concept of Mini Factories is relevant, as it allows a network-like interconnectivity between assets by setting up factories inside the premises of the principal manufacturer. It is stated that at the core of Industry 4.0 implementation, every asset (e.g. a machine, software, sensor or actuator, etc.), should be modeled via an Asset Administrative Shell (AAS). AAS is a knowledge structure that provides a description of the asset, its technical functionality and its relationships to other assets. It can be viewed as the bridge between the physical world and the IoT world or, in other words, the data model from where the digital twin stems from. In this paper we present a methodology to create Asset Administrative Shells in a Mini Factories context. We argue that our approach, effectively embodies concepts related to Industry 4.0 in a modular way, allowing the much-desired agility. By using our proposed methodology, Model Factory @ARTC has been able to create a seamless integration of assets into our factory of the future, demonstrating the connectivity and some of the enhanced capabilities of Industry 4.0.