Towards a Semantic Administrative Shell for Industry 4.0 Components

TL;DR

This paper proposes a semantic-based digital representation for Industry 4.0 components using formal knowledge representation languages to enhance communication and understanding in digitized manufacturing environments.

Contribution

It introduces a Semantic I4.0 Component concept leveraging RDF, RDF Schema, and OWL to create a standardized, semantic-rich Administrative Shell for Industry 4.0 objects.

Findings

Semantic representation improves interoperability in Industry 4.0 scenarios

The approach is demonstrated with a real-world use case

Semantic technologies facilitate better communication and comprehension

Abstract

In the engineering and manufacturing domain, there is currently an atmosphere of departure to a new era of digitized production. In different regions, initiatives in these directions are known under different names, such as industrie du futur in France, industrial internet in the US or Industrie 4.0 in Germany. While the vision of digitizing production and manufacturing gained much traction lately, it is still relatively unclear how this vision can actually be implemented with concrete standards and technologies. Within the German Industry 4.0 initiative, the concept of an Administrative Shell was devised to respond to these requirements. The Administrative Shell is planned to provide a digital representation of all information being available about and from an object which can be a hardware system or a software platform. In this paper, we present an approach to developing such a digital representation based on semantic knowledge representation formalisms such as RDF, RDF Schema and OWL. We present our concept of a Semantic I4.0 Component which addresses the communication and comprehension challenges in Industry 4.0 scenarios using semantic technologies. Our approach is illustrated with a concrete example showing its benefits in a real-world use case.