The Industrial Digital Twin Association e.V. (IDTA) publishes version 3.0 of the specification for the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) information model, which forms the basis for the standardized digital twin in industry. The specification describes in four parts how companies can prepare and structure information in the administration shell. The new version is ready for immediate implementation in the company. Future updates and extensions will be backward compatible. With the specification of the AAS in version 3.0, the industry has a standard for the industrial digital twin for the first time. 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 create their own administration shells and thus create a cross-company system of digital twins of a wide variety of components. The stable and industry-ready version ensures planning security across industries and the value chain. This is a milestone for future data rooms,” says Dr. Christian Mosch, Managing Director of IDTA.
Definition of the administration shell
The specification defines the software structure, the interfaces and the semantics of the AAS, which enable data from an industrial plant to be made available quickly and easily to all participants along the value chain in an interoperable manner over the entire life cycle, from engineering to recycling. The work of the responsible working group of the IDTA is based on the publications “Administration shell in detail” of the Industry 4.0 platform. A special focus in the development of the new version was on industrial applicability. An important innovation is the specification of an official interface to the AAS – the so-called API. This enables the partners in the value chain to exchange their data across company boundaries via the AAS and creates the necessary basis for the implementation of industrial data rooms in the future.
The specification of the AAS was 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 the subject of data specification and security are currently being worked on. All documents can be found on the IDTA website.