Software-heavy Asset Administration Shells: Classification and Use Cases

The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is an emerging technology for the implementation of digital twins in the field of manufacturing. Software is becoming increasingly important, not only in general but specifically in relation to manufacturing, especially with regard to digital manufacturing and a shift towards the usage of artificial intelligence. This increases the need not only to model software, but also to integrate services directly into the AAS. The existing literature contains individual solutions to implement such software-heavy AAS. However, there is no systematic analysis of software architectures that integrate software services directly into the AAS. This paper aims to fill this research gap and differentiate architectures based on software quality criteria as well as typical manufacturing use cases. This work may be considered as an interpretation guideline for software-heavy AAS, both in academia and for practitioners.