AASPMP: Design and Implementation of Production Management Platform Based on AAS

Intelligent transformation for traditional factories is a widely discussed topic. The key to this transformation is ensuring the integration between information technology and operational technology. However, it is a challenging task in industry owing to the communication heterogeneity of the underlying production equipment (horizontal communication), and inefficient interactions between the equipment and information decision center (vertical communication). In this paper, we explore asset administration shell (AAS), an asset virtualization technology, shielding heterogeneous physical communication protocol of production equipment. Besides, to promote inefficient communication between the equipment and information decision center, we adapt OPC UA protocol as the communication protocol of AAS for vertical communication. In addition, time-sensitive networking (TSN) is applied to ensure communication between the AAS and the corresponding physical device. Above operations ensure devices interconnection and interoperability. On this basis, we propose an AAS-based production management platform (AASPMP), which aims at the coverage from the demand side to the production side. Such an intelligent system characterizes three layers to decompose complicated system functionalities, and a visible client is provided for the convenience of remote operation and maintenance. We deploy our system on the actual production system and demonstrate the effectiveness of our design.