In the engineering and manufacturing domain, there is currently an atmosphere of departure to a new era of digitized production. In different regions, initiatives in these directions are known under different names, such as industrie du futur in France, industrial internet in the US or Industrie 4.0 in Germany. While the vision of digitizing production and manufacturing gained much traction lately, it is still relatively unclear how this vision can actually be implemented with concrete standards and technologies. Within the German Industry 4.0 initiative, the concept of an Administrative Shell was devised to respond to these requirements. The Administrative Shell is planned to provide a digital representation of all information being available about and from an object which can be a hardware system or a software platform. In this paper, we present an approach to developing such a digital representation based on semantic knowledge representation formalisms such as RDF, RDF Schema and OWL. We present our concept of a Semantic I4.0 Component which addresses the communication and comprehension challenges in Industry 4.0 scenarios using semantic technologies. Our approach is illustrated with a concrete example showing its benefits in a real-world use case.
The idea of bringing semantic descriptions of physical elements by combining OMM and a server realization has been conducted by @cite_6 . Nevertheless, this work is focused on the identification of the elements and still rely on the above mentioned limitations of OMM format.
@cite_6
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The SemProM format was basically designed for on-product RFID-based memories. Furthermore, some use cases demand centralized storage or data backups that cannot be achieved with on-product storage. For these cases (e.g., cheap products with very small labels, very large memories), a server-based solution might be more suitable. We developed the Object Memory Server (OMS) as an index server for product memories, based on the same set of metadata as the block format. The actual payload is outsourced to servers in the web. The URL used for accessing an OMS memory can be stored in simple and cheap RFID labels. Due to the large processing power of a server-based approach, the OMS can handle all SemProM incarnations, ranging from Reference SemProMs to Smart SemProMs. The conceptual ideas of the OMS were also transformed to provide a server-based solution for memories based on the W3C XG OMM format.