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The success of technologies depends not only on their innovative strength and acceptance, but also on their management. Decision-makers evaluate factors like technical framework conditions and organizational requirements, with the demand for flexibility adding to the complexity. Industry 4.0 addresses this with networking, transparency and decentralized decisions. Digital twins, which can be implemented with open source software, play a key role.

Establishing “smart” production processes that are focused on sustainability and based on aggregated data requires a great deal of exchange at various levels. The vertical integration of different production components provides companies with an important basis for achieving their sustainability goals. Digital twins can play a decisive role in driving this process forward.

In practice, the integration of heterogeneous IoT components is often a complex and confusing process. The different ways of representing information about individual assets create the desire for a standardized representation. The administration shell (AAS) creates a digital exchange format for this purpose. This potential is to be exploited and put into practice as part of the EIT project "AASHub". The aim of the project is to develop a process for integrating information from the administration shell into the IoT platform "Contact Elements for IoT". (Only in German)

This article presents a concept for the visualization of maintenance processes in Industry 4.0 using the reference architecture model Industry 4.0, in short RAMI 4.0. The mirroring of maintenance processes is done by transferring relevant maintenance terms from various standards into maintenance assets and the corresponding management shells. Here, the role of the human being has to be considered and the dynamic behaviour of maintenance processes has to be mapped. In this respect, this concept presents different methods of visualizing these issues.

Due to an increased product variety, the need for flexibly configured assembly systems is steadily growing. In contrast to classic assembly lines with predominantly rigid conveyor technology, efficient, individual assembly routes with cycle-independent processing times are implemented in a dynamically interconnected assembly system using intelligent control and AGVs. This article presents the most important factors for the IT-related implementation of a dynamically interconnected assembly system and shows which existing standards from the field of Industry 4.0 can be used for this purpose.