The Challenge
We’re Tackling
When physical assets such as components are bought or sold, both ownership and possession change hands, and the associated Asset Administration Shells (AAS) must be transferred as well. This raises several challenges:
- What needs to happen when an AAS moves from the manufacturer to the customer?
- What are the benefits if the customer manages their own AAS for the asset?
- How can operational data be transferred back to the manufacturer securely and with trust, for example to support R‑grading processes?
- And how can manufacturers keep customers reliably informed about important changes such as product updates or redesigns?
Solving these issues is key to enabling seamless, secure, and transparent collaboration across the entire lifecycle of an asset.
Participating
Members
What we’ve
done so far
To explore and address the challenges of cross-company AAS usage, we have taken a hands-on approach through a series of collaborative initiatives:
- We organized multiple hackathons to validate key concepts and foster community engagement.
- We implemented the “Cross-Enterprise AAS Transfer” feature to enable seamless handover of digital twins between stakeholders.
- To demonstrate the value of having a dedicated AAS on the customer side, we built a use case for goods-in inspection at the fictional “Next Bike Factory”. Here, the storage location of delivered components is written directly into the AAS of each component. This demonstrator is available as open source on GitHub.
- We also developed a Product Change Notification (PCN) demonstrator, using the AAS framework and a dedicated PCN submodel. This implementation is likewise open source and accessible to the community.
Why this project
matters and for who
The moment a company starts using the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) to exchange data with partners, practical questions emerge. How should AAS ownership be transferred? Is it better to reference or import it? What happens to the AAS ID? Where should it be registered?
This project focuses on solving exactly these questions. We look at how to keep AASs traceable across systems, when to use instance or type AAS, how to securely share operational data, and how to manage product updates through AAS-based change notifications.
These are real challenges faced by companies in connected supply chains. Addressing them is key to making industrial data exchange work in practice.
project
Deliverables
Paper(s)
Paper(s) that captures key findings and guidance from the project
Demonstrators
Running demonstrators for SPS and Hannover fair
Feedback
We want to give feedback on certain AAS specifications