Analysis of Asset Administration Shell-based Negotiation Processes for Scaling Applications

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the scalability and efficiency of Asset Administration Shell-based negotiation processes in industrial applications, focusing on message load and communication overhead as the number of assets increases.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable implementation of proactive AAS negotiation and provides empirical analysis of its performance limitations in large-scale scenarios.

Findings

Identifies performance bottlenecks in AAS negotiation at scale

Quantifies communication overhead with increasing assets

Highlights areas for standardization improvement

Abstract

The proactive Asset Administration Shell (AAS) enables bidirectional communication between assets. It uses the Language for I4.0 Components in VDI/VDE 2193 to facilitate negotiations, such as allocating products to available production resources. This paper investigates the efficiency of the negotiation, based on criteria, such as message load, for applications with a scaling number of assets. Currently, the focus of AAS standardization is on submodels and their security to enable interoperable data access. Their proactive behavior remains conceptual and is still a subject of scientific research. Existing studies examine proactive AAS architecture examples with a limited number of assets, raising questions about their scalability in industrial environments. To analyze proactive AAS for scaling applications, a scenario and evaluation criteria are introduced. A scalable implementation is developed using current architectures for proactive AAS, upon which experiments are conducted with a varying number of assets. The results reveal the performance limitations, communication overhead, and adaptability of the AAS-based negotiation mechanism scaling. This information can improve the further development and standardization of the AAS.