The vision of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) promises unprecedented interconnectedness of vendors, manufacturers and other partners in the value chain. A key enabler in this new landscape of communicating factories is the digital twin, a virtual replica of every asset that mirrors all its facets and properties along the whole life cycle. The ambition of including existing factories with legacy devices into this ecosystem is not without significant challenges. These older devices are equipped with purpose-built hardware and inflexibly bound to certain communication protocols that do not integrate with I4.0 interaction methods. In order to bridge this gap, an adapter is required that mediates between the highly optimized industrial protocols and modern, vastly linked I4.0 devices. This work presents a gateway, called the Multi-Message Broker (MMB), which can connect to legacy devices via a suite of appropriate interfaces and simultaneously offer I4.0-compliant APIs for these connected assets. This creates a digital twin for legacy devices and makes them accessible to I4.0 information exchange. The aim is to integrate plants and systems with the lowest possible effort. As existing device descriptions and information models can form a basis for the digital twin, this and their applicability for the MMB will also be discussed. A prototype that implements selected aspects of the concept will demonstrate the functionality and advantages of such a system.

Digital twins, the virtual representations of physical assets, processes or systems, are becoming increasingly important in cyber-physical systems. They are a foundational block of Industry 4.0, the movement to digitalize industrial processes.The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) has been established as the preferable model to capture interoperable digital twins in the context of Industry 4.0. As asset administration shells become more prevalent, so does the need for specialized software development kits (SDKs) to manage them.The intertwined Industry 4.0 value chains are highly dependent on interoperability. The SDKs for AAS are often the direct interface between the components, and the malfunctioning of the SDKs leads to the breakage of the value chain. It is therefore important that we have the tools to determine how individual SDKs behave, and detect when they malfunction. In this work, we implement an approach to assessing the maturity of the SDKs for managing asset administration shells, and perform a thorough survey and evaluation of the existing SDKs.

Industry 4.0 developers need high-quality libraries in their preferred programming languages to efficiently and ergonomically create, edit and exchange digital twins as Asset Administration Shell (AAS). Existing specifications of the AAS can not be directly translated into programming code. This leads to many, often manual, re-implementations of the AAS in different projects and programming languages. We present an approach for automatic generation of software libraries based on the formalized AAS meta-model. This shows that the development with our approach is 5× faster for a new language and 10× faster for a new version of the AAS meta-model, respectively.

In Industry 4.0, the digital twin is represented as an Asset Administration Shell. The Asset Administration Shell meta-model is used to develop this digital twin. A developer needs ready-made exchange formats and data schemas to be able to work efficiently with libraries in his programming languages. The existing representations of the metamodel in XML, JSON and RDF, in their current form, have been created manually by individual working group members. This process is error-prone and inconsistent in the enforcement of serialization rules, leading to many manual re-implementations of the Asset Administration Shell in each representation. We present an approach to automatically generate the different data schemas for information exchange between partners in the Industry 4.0 value chain, based on the intermediate representation of the formalized meta-model. The approach enables a practical and simple development process of and is scalable across different exchange formats and their future changes.

New approaches are regularly developed, but their implementation in existing environments is a challenge, and Industry 4.0 is not different. In this paper, we present our approach towards a modular and adaptable gateway to retrofit brownfield installation for use in the context of Industrial IoT. The aim is to close the gap between existing operational technology installation and modern IT infrastructure. To fulfil time constraints and flexibility requirements, a highly decoupled architecture employing a streaming platform is proposed. For the data to be useful for downstream processes, it is annotated with means of Industry 4.0 modelling standards. The loosely coupled gateway presented by us is intended to help make existing installations Industry 4.0 capable without having to re-engineer them directly.

Industrie 4.0 maps the digital twin as the Asset Administration Shell. To develop this digital twin, the Asset Administration Shell meta-model is used. A developer needs high-quality libraries in their programming languages to build the Asset Administration Shell in efficient and ergonomic way. The existing representations of the meta-model are inconvenient for moving from the specification to realizations in software development. This leads to many, often manual, re-implementations of the Asset Administration Shell in each programming language. We present an approach to automatically generate libraries based on the intermediate representation of the meta-model. The approach allows for practical and simple development process of Industrie 4.0 components, and scales across programming environments and future changes in the meta-model.

In this paper, we present our approach towards a modular and adaptable IoT gateway for operational data and functions in the use case of retrofitting brownfield installation for industrie 4.0. The aim is to enable the existing operational technology installation to provide accessible function endpoints that can be triggered by modern IT services. To fulfill the high demands of flexibility in the IT and the requirements towards time-critical response in the OT a highly decoupled architecture employing a streaming platform is proposed. In perspective to mediating between synchronous interaction in functional aspects and asynchronous behavior in OT-IT communication a function call gateway resolves this issue with the support of a highperformance RPC framework. For the concept to be useful for a wide range of retrofitted OT, design principles and modeling standards of Industrie 4.0 are used.

The comprehensive management function models (CMFM) represent a solution for the growing heterogeneity in the management plane of the industrial domain. We present the internal structure of the CMFM with a meta-model. The use of semantic techniques and knowledge formalization is a first step towards management automation from a human-centric point of view. This human-centric character also helps to keep the overview and comprehensive understanding in the vast field of the network management. The evaluation of the CMFM against well-known and widely used network management systems explains the extent of the novelty of this approach. The CMFM ease the management of heterogeneous industrial networks and are a first step towards the application of further automation measures like artificial intelligence.

This paper presents an approach for managing alarms and diagnoses in an integrated IT and automation environment. In order to face the challenges of the integration of IT services with automation systems, an approach based on WBEM/CIM is presented. The provided solution is mostly not bound to specific vendors or fieldbus technologies and can easily be extended towards other requirements and scenarios.

For several years many applications are using wireless communication in industrial automation, although wireless solutions (WS) are not yet fully integrated into the life cycle (LC) process of automation systems. Since several wireless technologies are candidates to fulfill given automation communication requirements, it is almost impossible for automation engineers to select the appropriate solution, to plan wireless solutions, or to perform diagnosis or fault analysis of a wireless network. Wireless specialists and specific tools are necessary for each potential WS. To overcome this problem, an information model for handling wireless systems throughout the life cycle (LC) has been developed in order to support automation engineers accessing the appropriate information when required. This paper presents the results of the project.

In this article an approach towards a modular generic field device, running on standard PC-hardware is presented. The work focusses on generating large numbers of software devices to be employed in stress test scenarios. The concept is based upon open source operating systems and virtualization. The design decisions regarding platform and device structure are discussed in detail. Furthermore a forecast on future real time capabilities of the approach is presented.

In modern automation systems, where a large amount of devices and a set of inter-operating heterogeneous field buses exist, the management of all the devices is still done device-by-device. Complex functions like “call device maintainer after reaching a device's service hour counter” for a group of devices within the network are still missing. Common management protocols like SNMP are not suitable for realizing such commands. With the introduction of Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) by the Distributed Management Task Force, an extensible system for the management of IT devices has been developed. This paper describes an approach how WBEM can be used for the management of PROFIBUS and PROFINET field bus systems using PROFIBUS International's “Identification & Maintenance” functions.

The recent developments of industrial Ethernet are brushing aside people's doubt whether industrial Ethernet could fulfill all of their requirements to real-time performance and reliability. Although designing a highly reliable network with strict real-time constraints is becoming possible, no method has been proposed to help network design systematically considering reliability and real-time constraints. A risk metric is proposed in this paper for evaluating the relationship between reliability mechanisms of an industrial Ethernet network and its real time performance. By simulation of an example network with ring topology the metric is shown to be a suitable basis for effective network optimization.

The rise of Industrial Ethernet as network technology for Distributed Automation Systems introduces the need for migration strategies from field bus based systems towards this new technology. This paper discusses the problem of acquiring and translating the information needed for the setup of a PROFINET/PROFIBUS proxy as an example for a migration solution. The diverse technologies defined for device information and representation are examined with respect to this task. Furthermore a solution to facilitate the engineering of such a proxy is presented.