Connecting PLCs with their Asset Administration Shell for Automatic Device Configuration

Current industrial automation systems integrate structural information and component configuration data within the code of their programmable logic controllers. This prevents the demanded flexibility and adaptability of Industrie 4.0 systems. The asset administration shell provides a defined mechanism for finding, accessing and interpreting standardized and vendor specific data of an asset.Within this work the asset administration shell has been analyzed according to its structure, its location, and its implementation forms. Based on that a concept is proposed to provide event driven run-time access for components to the asset administration shell, which enables an automatic self-configuration infrastructure for component instances. The proposed concept is applied on the logistic part of an aluminium cold rolling mill, provided by the SMS group. For demonstration the structural information of the logistic components has been described in terms of an AutomationML file, which has been loaded into a BaseX Database. The database content represents the asset administration shell, which is accessed during runtime by XQuery requests.