Application of the Asset Administration Shell in the context of Engineering Data Management Systems

Smart digital products and the resulting ecosystems are already enabling companies to create disruptive new digital business models today and will do so even more so in the future. Digital twins are one of the key technologies in the realization of such business models. In most cases, digital twins are already created in the early product development/engineering phases and continue to develop over the lifetime of the product. Particularly in engineering, there is already an intensive exchange of different parts of the digital twin within and across company boundaries (for example, between component manufacturers and system providers all the way to the customer/operator). This usually leads to different IT ecosystems for different stakeholders and industries. Standardized exchange of data is therefore essential to ensure a secure, trustworthy and efficient exchange of data within the enterprise IT and the value chain. This is where the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) comes to play. Using the example of a data management system, this contribution illustrates the various applications inside and outside the enterprise engineering IT of the Asset Administration Shell (e.g. import and export of Assets via Gaia-X-compliant data spaces or also just file-based) and discusses the respective use cases in more detail using concrete examples from projects funded by the BMBF, BMWK, EIT Manufacturing and the EU. The implementation of the use cases will be shown based on the engineering data management platform technology from CONTACT Software.