Modelling Agents in Industry 4.0 Applications Using Asset Administration Shell

Within Industry 4.0, more applications include multi-agent systems and integrated software agents in the newly developed solutions, as they can provide a valuable contribution to the manufacturing processes. This makes it important to create a digital representation of those virtual assets, similar to how this is done for physical ones. The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) has been designed for just this purpose - to create models of assets, containing all the relevant information. Currently, this is standard for physical assets, however, it could be of value to extend it beyond. We propose the usage of the AAS for creating information models of software agents and suggest a generic approach to apply the AAS meta-model to ensure semantic interoperability between them. For this purpose, we outline a structure and a set of specific submodels to group agent attributes, which can provide a description of all relevant information for a given task. We provide two examples of concrete agent s and outline how this approach will be further validated within future use cases.