Specification of Asset Administration Shell submodel templates based on industry standards

The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) has been called the cornerstone of interoperability, as it enables information from different domains to be modeled in a unified format, which can then be exported to other languages such as OPC UA, AutomationML, or RDF. The Asset Administration Shell organizes information into submodels, each referring to a specific domain, which can be standardized and used as templates to ensure interoperability. However, although these templates are often referred to as "standardized", the concepts they model are not usually derived from standard industry definitions, but rather from expert consensus or industry dictionary definitions. This article presents a preliminary approach that uses UML-based conceptualizations of industry standards to create standardized Asset Administration Shell submodel templates. The approach defines a set of mapping rules that transform UML class diagrams into instances of the AAS metamodel. In this way, the concepts present in an industry standard are included in a submodel template that represents a specific domain, allowing them to be used not only in predetermined use cases but in all possible use cases that may be present in a domain.