NOVAAS: A Reference Implementation of Industrie4.0 Asset Administration Shell with best-of-breed practices from IT engineering

The fundamental role played by 'new technologies' to enhance the manufacturing infrastructure, products and services is confirmed by the strategies, roadmaps and initiatives established by the developed countries such as EU-28, US, China and Japan. Putting the light on Europe, the key priorities for manufacturing are aligned with the Industry 4.0 strategy/program where the proliferation of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and technologies like predictive data analytics, cloud and edge computing are creating the foundation for smart factory, i.e. the efficient and effective connection between products, processes and their related services. However, even if the smart factory vision is quite clear, in practice, it is still unclear how it can be implemented in a way to allow the transparent data exchange between all the layers of a manufacturing company, as well as, between the manufacturing company and the value chain partners. Within the German Industrie4.0 program, the Asset Administration Shell concept is defined to create a standardized digital representation of the asset while ensuring interoperability between all the applications within the manufacturing ecosystem. In this paper, an implementation of the asset administration shell is provided - also called NOVAAS - based on the deep usage of internet technologies, languages and software engineering techniques and methods (such as DevOps, microservices, continuous integration, etc.). The main goal is to contribute towards a generic and extensible reference implementation of the concept.