Creation and Integration of Asset Administration Shells from Heterogeneous Data Sources

Heterogeneous data sources and inconsistent interfaces between different engineering disciplines pose a tremendous challenge in creating a virtual representation of a real-world product, plant or process. For this digital representation, the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is proposed as a standardized concept. Unfortunately, the creation of AAS often requires a huge manual effort in extracting and structuring information pieces from diverse engineering and operation data by hand. This work proposes a semi-automatic approach to extract engineering information from documents of the data types of PDF, STP, XML, AML, URDF and a method to execute AAS creation and merging. The possibilities and limitations of the proposed approach are discussed by using the three use cases.