The amount of necessary information and knowledge to fulfill the tasks within the factory planning domain is rapidly growing. Currently, data and documents containing relevant information are stored as single artifacts in various established systems which makes information gathering time-consuming. Therefore it would be helpful to connect the existing artifacts so that it is possible to get all information of different origins at a glance. As Semantic Web technologies are recently evolving from academic research to industry applications, Knowledge Graphs (KG) as one of their specific implementations seem to be a suitable option to manage and connect these information artifacts in a sustainable matter. This can effectively support knowledge management in factory planning and provides machine-readable access to domain information that can be used by currently emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. This paper focuses on the conceptual challenges related to the creation of a knowledge graph within the factory planning domain and proposes a concept for a platform to collect and access existing information and experiences from domain experts.

Virtual commissioning is evolving to become an indispensable part included in modern planning processes. New challenges related to recent technologies like the usage of information models in Industry 4.0 implementations make it necessary to test the behaviour in production-related communication beforehand. Different data aquisition methods have to be evaluated concerning their benefits, risks and the environment it has to be implemented in. Information model management and aggregation can help to fulfill these tasks. This concept paper focuses on architectural challenges related to the implementation of information models in brown- as well as green-field approaches and the overall management system behind.

Information models are defined as a comprehensive semantic description of data within a production system. These systems underlay a constant change. Therefore, the corresponding information models are also subject to continuous evolution. This paper shows approaches for the versioning compliant design of information models and their implementation as well as support strategies to assist such changes.

Information exchange across different departments in factories must be structured and verified for effective production processes. However, any such exchange across networks to clients must be compliant to company standards so that uniformity and security in data dispensation is maintained. Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) solutions provide users with the flexibility of discharging information through network based protocols. This paper aims to build a compliance testing methodology for external vendors of an organisation who are interconnected with the OPC UA Server-Client Protocols. The structure is built on a host of UA clients that test UA specifications and information models from these vendors. This enables an organisational entity, for example, a manufacturer, to provide its clients, in this case external vendors such as suppliers, with the flexibility of conforming to prescribed standards in a testing phase on an automated digital platform rather than with older methods such as data transfer though databases or documents. An implementation of this approach is presented using example servers created for this purpose. It follows that external vendors can perform compliance testing and possibly improve their standards to match the company standards through remote testing after proper authentication measures provided by OPC UA.

Virtual Commissioning is an important part of modern design engineering approaches. Early simulation models of newly developed production structures can help to elaborate and evaluate different ideas concerning new processes. The machine communication is an important part of this evaluation. Currently the focus is on different approaches like CPS, IIoT and the overall crosslinking in Industry 4.0 implementations. In many of these cases the functional static behaviour of the communication interface is checked in later phases of the development process and not in a dynamical aspect, although it is useful to understand it early to draw conclusions for the proceeding project. This paper shows an early simple approach for checking the dynamical interoperability between the different automation levels in a production environment by adapting known Virtual Commissioning methods to a broader view.

A production system consists of multiple production entities. To enable a manufacturing process, these entities have to exchange information. Information models offer the possibility to standardize the data exchange between the entities. In addition to a common communication protocol, concepts that integrate and aggregate the different entities into a common address space, have to be developed. Another important issue is the historicization of information, for example, to improve the production process or for legal reasons. Graph databases enable semantic relations between objects for representation and storage of information. Therefore, it is a promising concept to be used in the production context. This paper presents a concept for the aggregation and historicization of production entities into a graph database.