Improving Interoperability in the Exchange of Digital Twin Data Within Engineering Processes

In the context of digital transformation, digital twin data is increasingly being exchanged across company boundaries. As this data exchange is little or not at all standardized today, this results in major interoperability problems. Consequently, inefficiencies in the transfer of data occur, leading to high efforts in identification, structuring and completion as well as a lack of quality of the digital twin data especially within the engineering phase. Looking at the requirements from industrial experts to solve interoperability in the exchange of digital twin data, the concept of the asset administration shell (AAS) presented by Industry 4.0 offers possible solutions, which have not yet been implemented and validated in practice across organizations. For this purpose, a new, standardized, and cross-company data exchange and collaboration model as well as a prototype implementation in the context of the interoperable digital twin is under development to also analyze the benefits and potentials of the standardization approach. This paper presents the motivation and research problem of the project, and how expert knowledge and relevant existing work can be utilized to develop a solution based on empirical evidence and AAS capabilities.