Architecture for Shared Production Leveraging Asset Administration Shell and Gaia-X

To achieve flexible, resilient and sustainable production, the generation of dynamic cross-company supply chains gains importance. The Shared Production scenario aims at sharing manufacturing services within distributed production network through digital interfaces. A prerequisite is secure data sharing in a trustworthy network with certified participants and a common understanding concerning vocahulary, message structure and interaction patterns Gaia-X provides a solution for a secure and federated data infrastructure according to European values (ie., European Data Protection, transparency and trust). Asset Administration Shells (AAS) provide semantic and vendor-independent information models and VDI/VDE 2193 proposes message structure and interaction protocols for bidding procedures. In this paper, we present the combination of the three concepts to enable the Shared Production scenario. We elaborate on the requirements of Shared Production, develop a system architecture and model AAS Submodel templates to perform an automated bidding procedure. Additionally, the implementation is evaluated based on the bidding of production services to produce model trucks in a demonstrator ecosystem.