Standards Development

Scope

This document specifies a standardized Asset Administration Shell (AAS) submodel template for representing equipment behaviour catalogues (EBC). The specification defines mapping rules between EBC and AAS submodel template and the representation of EBC properties, behaviours, state transitions and external interactions.

Purpose

ISO 16400 provides an equipment model which contains information about equipment properties as well as equipment behaviours such as state transitions and operation results stemming from the machines’ activities. The widespread usage of simulation systems for forecasting performance, manufacturability and productivity demonstrates the need of liable and seamless data acquisition at any given point of interest within the products’ lifecycle. While the EBC representation of behaviour is unique, the IEC 63278 offers a structure to harmonize manifold digital twin viewpoints of product and Manufacturing Operations Management.

In this part of the ISO 16400 series, EBC templates are represented by means of AAS structure according to IEC 63278. The purpose of this work is to provide a standardized and interoperable representation of EBC templates and EBC items within Digital Twin environments. The EBC templates and EBC items become machine-readable AAS submodel templates and submodel instances with globally unique semantic identifiers, enabling their registration in standardized repositories and consumption by any conformant AAS-based toolchain without proprietary adaptation. By establishing a common information model and mapping rules, equipment behaviour information can be exchanged, discovered and reused across engineering, simulation and manufacturing applications.

An equipment vendor such as a machine tool maker and manufacturing device provider develops an EBC of his machine using a corresponding standardized template, or by following standardized methods and rules. The equipment vendor registers the EBC in a common repository or in their own open repository. As a result, the equipment vendor now has a means to show his equipment’s performance in a virtual factory. The user of a production simulation system such as a production system designer, operator, or manager will then construct a virtual production system by selecting an adequate EBC from the repository and check the performance and operation method of the equipment in the virtual factory. By doing so, it is possible to lower the cost and increase efficiency of planning, operation and management of manufacturing execution. The equipment manufacturer delivers equipment fulfilling the agreed capabilities of the virtual machine. The user of the equipment can be guaranteed of the equipment capabilities as defined in EBC.

Without a normative mapping between ISO 16400 and IEC 63278, every tool vendor implementing both standards must independently define the structural correspondence between EBC elements and AAS Submodel elements. This results in incompatible, vendor-specific representations of identical equipment behaviour information.

The present part resolves this gap by defining a single, normative submodel template structure together with the assignment of semantic identifiers from the ISO 16400 concept model to AAS concept descriptions. As a result, EBC submodel templates can be published in existing AAS submodel template registries, such as those maintained by Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA), and consumed by any conformant AAS runtime without transformation. This reduces the standardization burden on tool providers and ensures that EBC information remains semantically consistent across the boundaries of engineering, simulation and execution systems.