The Semantic Asset Administration Shell

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Semantic Asset Administration Shell, an RDF-based semantic representation for Industrie 4.0 components that enhances data integration and reasoning capabilities, bridging the gap between industrial standards and Semantic Web technologies.

Contribution

It provides an RDF ontology, RML mapping, validation resources, and reasoning methods for the Industrie 4.0 Asset Administration Shell, integrating Semantic Web techniques into industrial data models.

Findings

Semantic representation is manageable on embedded devices.

The approach improves data integration and reasoning in Industrie 4.0.

Overheads of semantic lifting are acceptable for industrial scenarios.

Abstract

The disruptive potential of the upcoming digital transformations for the industrial manufacturing domain have led to several reference frameworks and numerous standardization approaches. On the other hand, the Semantic Web community has made significant contributions in the field, for instance on data and service description, integration of heterogeneous sources and devices, and AI techniques in distributed systems. These two streams of work are, however, mostly unrelated and only briefly regard each others requirements, practices and terminology. We contribute to closing this gap by providing the Semantic Asset Administration Shell, an RDF-based representation of the Industrie 4.0 Component. We provide an ontology for the latest data model specification, created a RML mapping, supply resources to validate the RDF entities and introduce basic reasoning on the Asset Administration Shell data model. Furthermore, we discuss the different assumptions and presentation patterns, and analyze the implications of a semantic representation on the original data. We evaluate the thereby created overheads, and conclude that the semantic lifting is manageable, also for restricted or embedded devices, and therefore meets the needs of Industrie 4.0 scenarios.