Industry-ready standardised Digital Twin: Milestone for future Data Rooms

IDTA publishes Specification of the Asset Administration Shell

Industrial Digital Twin Association e.V. (IDTA) publishes version 3.0 of the specification of the information model of the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), which is the foundation for the standardised Digital Twin in the industry. In four parts, the specification describes how companies can compile and structure information in the Asset Administration Shell. The new version is ready for instant implementation in organisations. Future updates and extensions will be backward compatible. With the specification of the AAS in version 3.0, the industry has for the first time a standard for the industrial digital twin. This offers investment security and paves the way for a boost in innovation.

“The AAS with its uniform and open standards is the key component for interoperability in the industry. The specification enables providers and users of hardware and software to generate their own Asset Administration Shells and thus establish a cross-company system of Digital Twins of a wide variety of components. The stable and industry-ready version ensures reliable planning across industries and the value chain. This is a milestone for future data rooms,” says Dr Christian Mosch, Managing Director of IDTA.

The specification defines the software structure, the interface and the semantics of the AAS, which enable data from an industrial asset to be made available quickly and easily to all participants along the value chain in an interoperable manner throughout the entire life cycle, from engineering to recycling. The efforts of the responsible IDTA working group are based on the publications “Asset Administration Shell in Detail” of the Plattform Industrie 4.0. A special focus in the development of the new version was on industrial applicability. An important innovation is the specification of an official interface of the AAS – the so-called API. This enables partners in the value chain to exchange their data via the AAS across company boundaries and creates the necessary basis for the implementation of industrial data rooms in the future.

The specification of the AAS has been published in four parts:

• Part 1: Metamodel
• Part 2: Application Programming Interfaces (API)
• Part 3a: Data Specification – IEC 61360
• Part 5: Package File Format (AASX)

Further parts on data specification and security are currently in progress. All documents are available on the IDTA website (https://industrialdigitaltwin.org/en/content-hub).