A Unified Asset Management Architecture Based on OPC UA

Abstract

With the development of information technology, the demands for product specifications and customizations have attracted much attention in recent years. The traditional manufacturing systems struggle to face the fast-moving market conditions because they are specifically tailored in demand. To strengthen the flexibility and interoperability of the assets, Industry 4.0 (I4.0) proposes the concept of Asset Administration Shell (AAS), which provides digital representations for industrial assets. Although the content of AAS has been discussed from different perspectives, there is no standard implementation method for a general AAS currently. In this paper, we propose an AAS implementation method based on OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), which realizes the virtualization of industrial assets and shields the underlying protocols. It simultaneously provides a solution to the interconnection and interoperability of industrial network devices. Furthermore, a hierarchical asset management architecture based on AAS is designed to improve the management of industrial assets, laying the foundation for flexible manufacturing.