Strategic Part­ner­ship: Indus­trial Digital Twin Asso­ci­a­tion and OI4 Alliance Agree on Close Coop­er­a­tion

Frank­furt am Main, Germany / Reinach, Switzer­land, January 12, 2022 – The Indus­trial Digital Twin Asso­ci­a­tion e.V. (IDTA) and the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance (OI4) have signed a memo­randum of under­standing for close coop­er­a­tion. The goal of the coop­er­a­tion is to further advance digi­ti­za­tion in the industry based on the Asset Admin­is­tra­tion Shell (AAS). Initial coop­er­a­tion projects show how the two orga­ni­za­tions comple­ment each other. 

Both IDTA and OI4 pursue the vision that different indus­trial systems, such as manu­fac­turing machines and factory soft­ware solu­tions, interact seam­lessly in a digital envi­ron­ment – in other words, that they are inter­op­er­able. While IDTA, with its focus on defi­n­i­tions, provides the basic tech­nology for this in the form of spec­i­fi­ca­tions and stan­dard­ized sub-models, OI4 builds on these defi­n­i­tions. As an imple­men­ta­tion alliance with its 92 members, OI4 carries out imple­men­ta­tion projects within the open ecosystem in order to contribute to end-to-end networking from the machine to the cloud. 

The ifm group of compa­nies (ifm) is a member of both orga­ni­za­tions and uses the comple­men­tary compe­tences for a specific appli­ca­tion in the food and beverage sector: “The coop­er­a­tion of IDTA and OI4 is an impor­tant step to fully exploit the poten­tials for the fourth indus­trial revo­lu­tion. We are already bene­fiting from the regular exchange between the stan­dard­iza­tion and imple­men­ta­tion levels of IDTA and OI4 in one of our projects, which focuses on the topic of condi­tion moni­toring,” says Bastian Schmick, connec­tivity expert at ifm. 

FURTHER JOINT DEVEL­OP­MENT OF THE DIGITAL TWIN 

The Asset Admin­is­tra­tion Shell (AAS) – also known as the manage­ment shell – forms the basis for the digital twin and thus connects the phys­ical world of machines on the store floor with the world of their digital images. As part of the coop­er­a­tion, IDTA and OI4 are working to further develop the Digital Twin so that it can be applied as an open and inter­op­er­able solu­tion. 

The AAS infra­struc­ture enables this open exchange on both a tech­nical and semantic level. The estab­lished stan­dards create an open ecosystem suit­able for indus­trial green­field and brown­field facil­i­ties. “At ifm, we strongly believe in the huge poten­tial of open­ness and collab­o­ra­tion and are there­fore happy to partic­i­pate in the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance and IDTA,” explains Kai Bürger, Product Manager at ifm. 

THE EFFECTS OF SYNERGY: NO INTER­OP­ER­ABLE CONCEPTS WITHOUT STAN­DARD­IZED SPEC­I­FI­CA­TIONS 

With its members from the elec­trical industry, mechan­ical engi­neering and the soft­ware industry, the IDTA is resolutely driving forward the AAS devel­op­ment process with the aim of making it avail­able to every company inter­na­tion­ally. The tech­no­log­ical basis of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance is an open archi­tec­ture based on RAMI 4.0, which is built on the four building blocks of Device Connec­tivity, Edge, Oper­ator Cloud and Cloud Central – as well as a corre­sponding service offering. 

One of the most impor­tant features of the archi­tec­ture is Auto­matic Asset Onboarding through all four archi­tec­ture layers using open stan­dard inter­faces based on AAS. “With this, we are relying on an Industry 4.0 key tech­nology in OI4,” says Michael Riester, Senior Enter­prise Archi­tect at Endress + Hauser Process Solu­tions GmbH, which is also a member of both orga­ni­za­tions. “Comple­menting this, IDTA provides the neces­sary spec­i­fi­ca­tions. It harmo­nizes sub-models and defines processes, criteria and tools for the digital twin as a basis for ensuring inter­op­er­ability in multi-vendor scenarios. Thus, the IDTA is of central impor­tance for the success of the inter­op­er­able concepts being devel­oped by OI4.” The resulting synergy will benefit the networks of both coop­er­a­tion part­ners. 

PRESEN­TA­TION OF FIRST COOP­ER­A­TION PROJECTS AT VIRTUAL IN-HOUSE EXHI­BI­TION OF OI4 

Similar to the project at ifm, there are already 17 other pilot projects from the ranks of the member compa­nies of both orga­ni­za­tions, such as the connec­tion of sensors from different manu­fac­turers to the cloud plat­form of Endress+Hauser, which enables fully auto­mated onboarding of plants thanks to manu­fac­turer-inde­pen­dent AAS. They will show how the concepts of IDTA and OI4 comple­ment each other in prac­tice and can be imple­mented with tech­nical ease. On January 26 and 27, they will be presented to a broad audi­ence from industry at a virtual in-house exhi­bi­tion of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance under the motto of “Connect to Open Imple­men­ta­tion”. 

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