Semantic Interoperability of Digital Twins: Ontology-based Capability Checking in AAS Modeling Framework

Industry 4.0 currently prepares a major shift towards extreme flexibility into production lines management. Digital Twins are one of the key enabling technologies for Industry 4.0. However, the interoperability gap among digital representation of Industry 4.0 assets is still one of the obstacles to the development and adoption of digital twins. If the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), the standard proposed to represent the I4.0 components, caters for syntactic interoperability, a more semantic kind of interoperability is deeply needed to develop flexible and adaptable production lines. In our work, we overcome the limitation of current syntactic-only resource matching algorithms by implementing semantic interoperability based on ontologies i.e., by transforming AAS-based plant models into MaRCO (Manufacturing Resource Capability Ontology) instances and then query the expanded ontology to find the needed resources. This article presents this ontology-based approach as the first step towards the design and implementation of an automated I4.0 flexible plant supervision and control system based on model-driven engineering (MDE) within the “Papyrus for Manufacturing” toolset. We show how an MDE approach can aggregate around digital twin modeling tools from the Papyrus platform both I4.0 technologies and AI (Knowledge Representation and Reasoning) tools. Our platform aligns modeling and ontological elements to get the best of both worlds. This method has two main advantages: (1) to provide semantic descriptions for digital twin models, (2) to complement model-driven engineering tools with automated reasoning. This paper showcases this approach through a robotic cell use case.