A Methodology for the Design and Creation of Asset Administration Shell for Manufacturing Systems

Within Industry 4.0 the communication between the physical and the cyber part of manufacturing systems is in growing rise in complexity. The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is an information framework that represents the technological features of an asset. This work addresses the design of AAS by proposing a methodology to guide practitioners through the process of creating AAS models for manufacturing systems, and populating them with real-time data from the field. The aim of the paper is to design a methodology for the creation of AAS that is user friendly and functional to be followed by non-IT experts. The proposed methodology has been applied and validated within the Industry 4.0 Lab of the School of Management of Politecnico Di Milano