The holistic application of data-driven value-adding services (DDSs) to shop-floor assets (SFAs; e.g. equipment, machines, components) is a major obstacle, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): Due to the high complexity and required expertise in various disciplines. It is necessary to i) select suitable DDSs for a relevant component in production, ii) provide data for their training, iii) deploy the DDSs in the given IT/OT infrastructure, and iv) setup data-streams between SFAs, DDSs, and dashboards. Currently, many companies are implementing flagship projects that go through the necessary steps for individual components, but these isolated solutions are not scalable due to the need for manual intervention. This paper describes how to completely automatize the four steps and their consolidation in a scalable Industry 4.0 one-stop-shop solution. To achieve this goal, each asset is equipped with an Asset Administration Shell (AAS) that specifies, in particular, the represented asset's capabilities, the data required to apply such a capability and the data generated by a capability. Based on the AASs of SFAs, DDSs, and computing resources (CRs), a matching service suggests automatically which DDSs would add value to which SFAs and, for each SFA-DDS match, in which CR to deploy the DDS. A trade fair demonstration provides strong support for the statements made: The one-stop-shop solution including the automatic matching greatly simplifies the application of data-driven services and, in some cases, even makes it possible at all.

Interoperable digital twins (DT) simplify and automate the implementation of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) use cases like Collaborative Condition Monitoring (CCM), Product and Corporate Carbon Footprint (PCF, CCF) and the Digital Product Passport (DPP) - aiming at adaptivity, resource-efficiency, user-friendliness, compliance with legal requirements and value-creation. Platforms accelerate the development and deployment of DTs and services and ensure their resilient operation in order to capture especially all relevant shop-floor information, for example to aggregate PCFs, CCFs, and DPPs or to report on sustainability - automatically. However, platform operators should in particular avoid cloud provider lock-ins to be able to react flexibly to use case requirements at any time. The technology must be manageable and costs must be controllable. The aim is to achieve a break-even point between security, costs, future viability and controllability, short implementation time and motivated use. Such requirements can currently only be met with cloud infrastructures. An agnostic design ensures that switching infrastructures is possible and can be done both securely and quickly. To this end, this paper develops an out-of-the-box cloud native and cloud agnostic DT platform providing specialized, stateless, loosely coupled DT services interacting within a service mesh. The developed platform meets the requirements, can easily be executed in any public, private and hybrid cloud, and can be scaled horizontally without any further ado.

Assets’ Digital Twins (DTs) are a key component to establish an adaptive, resource-efficient, value-creating and user-friendly Industrie 4.0 (I4.0). Efficient and resilient data streams from assets to DTs and further components like value-based services must be configurable with as little manual effort as possible – and ideally automatically during DT execution. This paper proposes an I4.0-compliant, interoperable submodel for the configuration of DT connectors to other components’ interfaces and protocols. Since I4.0 DT runtimes are able to process submodels by design, only little adjustment is necessary to enable the creation, update and removal of such DT connectors during DT execution. In particular, this feature enables automatic DT orchestration, adaptive asset integration and administration, and flexible DT persistence and recovery.

The following paper describes a concept for a grasping application which utilizes technologies from the fields of distributed computing, robotics and Digital Twins in the sense of Industry 4.0. Hereby, the goal of the application is to have a computer vision system detect toy bricks which a robot has to pick and pass to a user. The application is divided into loosely coupled and distributed services that communicate with one another using a message broker.

Today's high complexity and required expertise in various disciplines for data-based evaluations of shop-floor assets is challenging. This paper describes the ongoing development towards an Industry 4.0 ecosystem enabling Smart Services and shop-floor assets to network autonomously. Three partial solutions are combined for this purpose: Industry 4.0 digital twins, automated data streams and a Smart Service toolbox. A prototypical implementation proves the general practicability. Furthermore, future work is outlined to achieve full autonomy.

Major benefit of Digital Twins lies in collaboration across value added chains based on semantic interoperability. The concept of the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) enables sharing of semantically enriched information in Industrie 4.0 application scenarios and beyond. Nevertheless, a technical infrastructure is needed that can ensure data sovereignty, i.e. integrity, confidentiality and availability of information shared across business partners in value added chains. This paper presents the current state of work on such a technical infrastructure for Asset Administration Shells (AAS). It combines three technologies: a blockchain books who changed an AAS and when, a peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed file system encrypts and stores each version of an AAS and a version-control system tracks changes to an AAS in detail. An exemplary value added chain is defined, which will be implemented in a demonstrator. This demonstrator will be used to evaluate and improve the proposed technical infrastructure for collaboration of AAS across value added chains.