An Analysis of Use Cases for the Asset Administration Shell in the Context of Edge Computing

Monitoring and life cycle management of industrial plants and their devices is a crucial task to avoid plant downtimes and safety risks. The emergence of Edge Computing allows monitoring applications to be deployed close to the devices, benefiting from a minimum response time, but also adhering to strong privacy policies. At the same time, life cycle management applications need to involve information from multiple parties, e.g., the device vendor, the operator, and maintenance staff. Thus, information needs to be processed in a standardized format so that it can be exchanged across company borders. The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) serves as such a standardized information modeling and exchange format in Industry 4.0. This paper discusses use cases that benefit from a deployment of an AAS infrastructure on edge computing devices. We collected and analyzed use cases around device monitoring and management from recent sources in the industrial context and discuss how our vision of "AAS on the edge" enables these use cases. Furthermore, we list open challenges that currently hinder the successful implementation of these use cases in practice.