Extending factory digital Twins through human characterisation in Asset Administration Shell

This paper extends the traditional factory digital twins by incorporating human characterisation in Asset Administration Shell (AAS). The extension lays the basis for human-centred control and management, as demonstrated by employing a prototype of the extended AAS in two proposed use cases. Referred to Industry 5.0, an accurate digital representation of humans as a basis of the data-based decision support to improve operators’ well-being and resilience. The AAS is extended to include dedicated digital models accommodating a set of properties to describe the human operators and its interactions with the surrounding shop-floor resources. Two reference use cases have been designed in the context of a complete lab-scale manufacturing system: equipment and devices have been modelled according to the AAS standard, exposing information via MQTT, and have been integrated with the proposed AAS definition of human operators. Operators have been equipped with wearable sensors and a dashboard providing them with feedback from the manufacturing environment and notifications about changes. As part of the extension process, some ethical and regulation concerns are discussed, highlighting that the extended AAS is mature enough to support the inclusion of human operators, but regulations struggle to keep up with technological advances.