For mechanical engineering
Your customer demands an Asset Administration Shell
The effort is not in the format. Anyone can write XML. The effort lies in the question
of which values your machine reliably gives up and what they mean — and no
specification answers that, only a look at your plant.
This page tells you which stage you need, what each demands of you — and what of it
demonstrably runs here. All four run; where a limit remains, it is stated below.
01
Nameplate and technical data as a file
belegt What you deliver
What is on the nameplate and in the data sheet. Nothing more.
What comes out
An Asset Administration Shell per the published IDTA templates 02006 (Digital Nameplate) and 02003 (Technical Data). That is what most tenders actually require.
In this factory
The four nameplate properties here carry the IRDIs from IDTA 02006-2-0 — read from the specification, not noted down from memory. A home-made identifier under admin-shell.io looks genuine and isn’t.
02
Every property individually identifiable
belegt What you deliver
A signal list or an engineering export from EPLAN or TIA.
What comes out
A property list in which every property carries its own identifier — not that of its submodel. Only then can a counterpart say “that is the wear” instead of “that belongs to the operating data”. This is the core of what tenders call a companion specification.
In this factory
134 terms across 670 properties, generated rather than maintained: a hand-kept list drifts from the plant after the second property, and nobody notices. Before, there were 14 identifiers — one per submodel.
03
Filled from operation instead of from a spreadsheet
belegt What you deliver
An interface on the controller. OPC UA if present — otherwise holding registers are enough.
What comes out
An Asset Administration Shell whose operating values come from the running machine and are historised. The difference from stage 2 is the difference between a data sheet and a twin.
In this factory
29 assets in this factory carry their Asset Administration Shell from live operation, among them a 1998 band saw over Modbus. In the AAS tree it is indistinguishable from a machine from 2022.
04
An endpoint the counterpart queries itself
belegt What you deliver
A server at the customer’s or at yours, and a decision about access.
What comes out
A conformant AAS server (BaSyx, FA³ST) with the Part 2 REST interface, against which a third-party tool can work without prior arrangement.
In this factory
Since 25 August an Eclipse BaSyx server with the Part 2 interface has been running alongside our own read interface: 29 Asset Administration Shells, 140 submodels and 130 ConceptDescriptions, rebuilt every fifteen minutes from live operation. A counterpart queries it without asking us — and resolves the identifier of a property down to its German-language definition.
Measured, not asserted
AutomationML gives you the plant — not the signals
“We read in your engineering data” is the sentence you hear everywhere. We measured it
— on the RobotCell sample file from AutomationML e.V., a spot-welding cell with five
KUKA robots, written by the standards people themselves.
116
of which equipment, with type and parent reference
206
Structure and geometry, deliberately left out
The topology arrives without anyone typing it in — 116 pieces of equipment with their
place in the tree. The signals do not: all 168 attributes of the file are position
data in x/y/z. Whoever promises you that a finished twin falls out of an engineering
file promises too much. What AML saves is the interviews
with maintenance. What it does not save is the signal list.
What we do not claim
Conformant is a part, not the whole
Loading conformity report …
The plant calculates this distinction itself and delivers it with the data — it is not
on a slide. For your customer this is exactly the first follow-up question at the
acceptance meeting, and an answer from the machine is worth more there than a
promise.
See the complete AAS tree → What the server still lacks today
Three limitations you should know about
A snapshot, not a stream.
The server keeps its data in memory and is rebuilt every fifteen minutes. Between
two runs it shows the state of the last one. For master data that is right, for a
momentary value it is not.
Only on this machine.
It listens on localhost, not on the network. A write-capable AAS server open on the
network would be a write path into the plant description that nobody ordered.
Access belongs in a project, not on a demo page.
BaSyx 2 is a preview.
Pinned to 2.0.0-milestone-15. Version 2 is not yet finally
released — whoever builds on it today builds on something that is still moving.
None of these three stands in the way of your acceptance meeting. They are here so that
you hear them from me and not from your customer.
Intro call
90 minutes, and you know which stage you are at
Bring what you have: your customer’s requirement or the tender text, a signal list, an
EPLAN or TIA export, a photo of the control cabinet. At the end you know which stage
your customer really demands — the demanded one is often lower than the feared one —,
what your existing data already covers of it and what is missing.