Navigating the Digital Twin: 3D Exploration for Asset Administration Shell Content

The digital twin (DT) as the core for digitalization activities becomes ever more prevalent in both research and industry. One emerging interpretation of the DT concept is the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), which describes – on a semantic and machine-readable level – each asset with a structured data set for its characteristics, lifecycle status, capabilities, etc. In complex products, such as production systems that consist of many subsystems, there are consequently also many AAS, each with individual submodel structures. Because the AAS hierarchy does not necessarily align with the physical structure of a system, assistance in accessing information and services from the digital twin is required for different processes, e.g., maintenance and service tasks. In this contribution, the concept for a web-based visualization application is presented, which uses the association of 3D geometry and AAS to create an interactive 3D view. This allows access to AAS hierarchies, submodels, and associated information on different levels and granularity. The goal is to utilize standardized submodels to enable easy navigation through the many-faceted AAS and fast data retrieval. In this way, the AAS and respectively the DT can intuitively be queried, and its contents can be displayed to the user without prior knowledge of the structure. The first working prototype is implemented for a production system, where the focus is on accessing information about its control cabinet with certain terminals.