Towards a Semantic Administrative Shell for Industry 4.0 Components

Abstract

In the engineering and manufacturing domain, there is currently an atmosphere of departure to a new era of digitized production. In different regions, initiatives in these directions are known under different names, such as industrie du futur in France, industrial internet in the US or Industrie 4.0 in Germany. While the vision of digitizing production and manufacturing gained much traction lately, it is still relatively unclear how this vision can actually be implemented with concrete standards and technologies. Within the German Industry 4.0 initiative, the concept of an Administrative Shell was devised to respond to these requirements. The Administrative Shell is planned to provide a digital representation of all information being available about and from an object which can be a hardware system or a software platform. In this paper, we present an approach to develop such a digital representation based on semantic knowledge representation formalisms such as RDF, RDF Schema and OWL. We present our concept of a Semantic I4.0 Component which addresses the communication and comprehension challenges in Industry 4.0 scenarios using semantic technologies. Our approach is illustrated with a concrete example showing its benefits in a real-world use case.

Architecting systems‐of‐systems and their constituents: A case study applying Industry 4.0 in the construction domain

“…However, it does not provide more information about those identifiers. Other documents suggest the use of concepts from the Semantic Web initiative …”

“…For this expressiveness, RDF is the most widely used standardized notation, and thus provides stability, while at the same time being extensible enough to allow the needed flexibility. The same framework is also suggested for use in I4.0 …”

SEMIoTICS: Semantically Enhanced IoT-Enabled Intelligent Control Systems

“…An attempt to design selfconfigurable systems composed of IoT components has been also presented in [21]. There is also work from the "smart factory" domain and the Industry 4.0 concept, with teams working on modelling the information about factory objects (hardware or software) using semantic knowledge formalisms [22] and also modelling the IoT resources and processes towards optimal resource management [23].…”

IoT-Based Techniques for Online M2M-Interactive Itemized Data Registration and Offline Information Traceability in a Digital Manufacturing System

“…Since ontology can be used to establish the relations between variable for some computation for a particular domain of discourse, it is considered a promising solution to organise information and limit complexity in the fields like semantic web, system engineering, and software engineering. Due to the fundamental importance, ontology is widely used in IoT-based systems including digital manufacturing, such as IoT-O to promote the semantic interoperability in oneM2M architecture [14], and Semantic I4.0 Component for Industry 4.0 scenarios [15]. The new method for managing dynamic ontologies in the manufacturing domain can potentially promote the manufacturing enterprise as a highly dynamic environment.…”