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Digitization of industrial environments through an industry 4.0 compliant approach

Publication . Sakurada, Lucas; Prieta Pintado, Fernando De la; Leitão, Paulo

About a decade after the introduction of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) as a paradigm oriented towards the digitization of industrial environments, centered on the concept of industrial Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) to enable the development of intelligent and distributed industrial systems, many companies around the world are still not immersed in this digital transformation era. This transition is not straightforward and requires the aligned with the novel technologies, architectures and standards to migrate entire traditional systems into I4.0 systems. In this context, this paper presents an approach to perform the digitization of non-I4.0 components/systems into I4.0 through an approach based on the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), which is a standardized digital representation of an asset. This approach enables to hold the asset information throughout its lifecycle, provides a standard communication interface with the asset, and is based on a set of modules that are combined with the AAS to provide novel functionalities for the asset, e.g., monitoring, diagnosis and optimization. Moreover, this approach adopts Multi-agent Systems (MAS) to provide mainly autonomy and collaborative capabilities to the system. The agents are able to get information from the AASs, making intelligent decisions and perform distributed tasks following interaction strategies, e.g., collaboration, negotiation and self-organization. The feasibility of the proposed approach was tested by digitizing a small-scale production system comprising several assets.

2023Conference paper

Open access

A methodology for integrating asset administration shells and multi-agent systems

Publication . Sakurada, Lucas; Prieta Pintado, Fernando De la; Leitão, Paulo

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is promoting the digitization of industrial environments towards intelligent and distributed industrial automation systems based on Cyber-physical Systems (CPS). Currently, this digitization process is being leveraged by the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), which digitally describes an asset in a standardized and semantically unambiguous form throughout its lifecycle. However, more robust solutions based on autonomous AASs endowed with collaborative and intelligent capabilities, also called proactive AASs, are still in the early stages. In this context, Multi-agent Systems (MAS) are a key enabler to provide the required autonomy, intelligence and collaborative capabilities for the AASs. With this in mind, this paper presents a methodology positioned with respect to the Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0) layers, which provides guidelines for integrating AASs and MAS, aiming to support the development of proactive AASs. The applicability of the proposed methodology was tested through the integration of AASs and MAS for a smallscale CPS demonstrator.

2023Conference paper

Open access