Increasing Interoperability between Digital Twin Standards and Specifications: Transformation of DTDL to AAS

Abstract

Although standards and specifications for digital twins aim to create interoperability in Industry 4.0, each standard has its own goals, focuses and representations for digital twins. This paper examines an approach to increasing interoperability between established digital twin specifications by transformation. Accordingly, several specifications are presented and requirements for transformation are examined. Following the feasibility analysis, a mapping between the Digital Twin Definition Language (DTDL) and Asset Administration Shell (AAS) was created. To examine the feasibility of this approach, the transformation was implemented and tested for a physical asset. This paper demonstrates that a generic mapping between DTDL and AAS can be applied for transformation in use cases where DTDL models are provided while AAS is required.

Keywords

• Industry 4.0
• interoperability
• digital twin
• asset administration shell
• semantic transformation
• standards