A Digital Twin Description Framework and its Mapping to Asset Administration Shell

TL;DR

This paper introduces an extended framework for describing Digital Twins, demonstrates its application on an industrial drilling machine, and maps it to the Asset Administration Shell standard to enhance understanding and integration.

Contribution

It extends a Digital Twin description framework and maps it to the Asset Administration Shell standard, facilitating better reporting and system integration.

Findings

Extended description framework for Digital Twins.

Mapping to Asset Administration Shell standard.

Practical example with industrial drilling machine.

Abstract

The pace of reporting on Digital Twin (DT) projects continues to accelerate both in industry and academia. However, these experience reports often leave out essential characteristics of the DT, such as the scope of the system-under-study, the insights and actions enabled, and the time-scale of processing. A lack of these details could therefore hamper both understanding of these DTs and development of DT tools and techniques. Our previous work developed a DT description framework with fourteen characteristics as a checklist for experience report authors to better describe the capabilities of their DT projects. This report provides an extended example of reporting to highlight the utility of this description framework, focusing on the DT of an industrial drilling machine. Furthermore, we provide a mapping from our description framework to the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) which is an emerging standard for Industry 4.0 system integration. This mapping aids practitioners in understanding how our description framework relates to AAS, potentially aiding in description or implementation activities.