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Although standards and specifications for digital twins aim to create interoperability in Industry 4.0, each standard has its own goals, focuses and representations for digital twins. This paper examines an approach to increasing interoperability between established digital twin specifications by transformation. Accordingly, several specifications are presented and requirements for transformation are examined. Following the feasibility analysis, a mapping between the Digital Twin Definition Language (DTDL) and Asset Administration Shell (AAS) was created. To examine the feasibility of this approach, the transformation was implemented and tested for a physical asset. This paper demonstrates that a generic mapping between DTDL and AAS can be applied for transformation in use cases where DTDL models are provided while AAS is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industry 4.0 supports the vision of networked machines in decentralized production plants across the value chain. Hence, it requires highly connected partners exchanging relevant data about products, processes, and production resources. This paper proposes the usage of data spaces and digital twins to enable this Industry 4.0 vision and investigates the building blocks to realize a data space for Industry 4.0, e.g., the integration of digital twins inside the data space based upon the latest specification of the Industry 4.0 Asset Administration Shell. A prototypical implementation shows the feasibility of storing product carbon footprints inside a digital twin and sharing it over a data space with other partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to combine the concept of digital twins with the concept of dataspaces to fulfill the original expectation that a digital twin is a comprehensive virtual representation of physical assets. Based upon a terminological and conceptual discussion of digital twins and dataspaces, this paper claims that a systemic approach towards digital twin Systems is required. The key conceptual approach consists of a Reference Model for Digital Twin Systems (DTS-RM) and a hypothesis regarding a symbiotic evolution. The DTS-RM distinguishes between a digital twin back-end platform comprising the access and management of comprehensive digital twin instances and digital twin-related services, and digital twin front-end services that are tailored to the demands of applications and users. The main purpose of the back-end platform is to decouple the digital twin's generation and management from the usage of the digital twin for applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital twins (DTs) are digital representations of assets, capturing their attributes and behavior. They are one of the cornerstones of Industry 4.0. Current DT standards are still under development, and so far, they typically allow for representing DTs only by attributes. Yet, knowledge about the behavior of assets is essential to properly control and interact with them, especially in the context of industrial production. This behavior is typically represented by multiple different models, making integration and orchestration within a DT difficult to manage. In this paper, we propose a new approach for hybrid DTs by intertwining different DT models. We also show how to realize this approach by combining the Fraunhofer Asset Administration Shell (AAS) Tools for Digital Twins (FAST) to create Industry 4.0-compliant DTs with Apache StreamPipes to implement and manage multiple DT models. Our prototype implementation is limited to a subset of the AAS metamodel and pull-based communication between FAST and an external Apache StreamPipes instance. Future work should provide full support for the AAS metamodel, publish/subscribe-based communication, and other execution environments as well as deployment strategies. We also present how this approach has been applied to a real-world use case in the steel production industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]