Sartorius Lab Instruments GmbH & Co. KG is working with Fraunhofer IESE to develop a future-proof production architecture with Asset Administration Shells and Eclipse BaSyx.
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What it is all about:
Sartorius and Fraunhofer IESE are implementing Digital Twins with BaSyx
The challenge:
How to deal with flexible production requirements and a constantly growing number of variants?
The support:
Fraunhofer IESE supports Sartorius in the implementation of new production systems including Digital Twins
The result:
Development of a highly modular, versioned, and distributed production system
Your benefits:
Fraunhofer IESE is your partner for Industrie 4.0, Digital Twins, and Asset Administration Shells
A high number of variants poses great challenges for production systems. It must be possible to introduce new variants easily; extensions must be modular and seamlessly integrable. For modular, flexible, and automated production that enables these goals, Digital Twins are a key technology. Many different aspects must be addressed: How to describe products and their numerous variants efficiently? How to implement production services in a configurable and interchangeable way? How to integrate existing devices and services? How to record the data and information generated in the process and use them to improve production?
It is precisely these core issues where Fraunhofer IESE provides support to Sartorius Lab Instruments GmbH & Co. KG in this joint project. The use of Asset Administration Shells and the various components of Eclipse BaSyx enables rapid implementation of Digital Twins. Fraunhofer IESE is supporting Sartorius in the implementation of this production architecture of the future – both in an advisory capacity for the conceptual design of the system architecture, taking into account existing and future application scenarios, and in the concrete realization of the various system blocks and Digital Twins with the help of BaSyx.
Sartorius provides a wide range of products with many different product variants. The products are dynamically adapted and configured to the respective customer requirements during commissioning. This results in many challenges for the production systems used in the process:
Fraunhofer IESE is supporting Sartorius in large parts of the systems & software engineering process aimed at the creation of the new production system.
Conceptual Design
With Fraunhofer IESE’s many years of expertise regarding the use of Digital Twins in Industrie 4.0, a valuable contribution is being made to the conceptual design of the architecture of the new production system of Sartorius through active participation in workshops as well as through architecture reviews. Based on detailed knowledge of standards such as the Asset Administration Shell as an implementation of the Digital Twin, new key technologies can be included in the design at a very early stage.
Implementation
With Eclipse BaSyx, Fraunhofer IESE offers a versatile open-source solution for the implementation of Industrie 4.0 and Asset Administration Shells that enables fast and focused realization of use cases. By providing the Digital Twin infrastructure as easy-to-use and easy-to-configure off-the-shelf components in the form of Docker Images, the foundation of the use cases to be implemented can be established quickly. Use cases are implemented with the various components of the BaSyx Software Development Kit, without the need to deal with the details of the Asset Administration Shell infrastructure. In combination with the expertise of the IESE project team in implementing products in Java, an effective and efficient contribution is made to the planning, implementation, and associated maintainability of the production system. Changes to the machines or the production process can thus be realized as quickly as possible – without further intensive development work on the production system.
Training & Review
As another important contribution to the project with Sartorius, Fraunhofer IESE is providing knowledge transfer on various topics related to product development with Java and Eclipse BaSyx. In training sessions, issues concerning Asset Administration Shells, the use of the Eclipse development environment, efficient test strategies, and clean code are addressed.
The clean code & BaSyx expertise of Fraunhofer IESE is not only passed on to Sartorius staff within a single training session, but also in continuous review rounds, thus ensuring continuous and sustainable knowledge transfer within the company.
As a result of the project, a highly modular, versioned, and distributed production system is being created according to state-of-the-art development practices based on Industrie 4.0, Digital Twins, and Java. The system enables Sartorius to respond quickly and efficiently to customer requests. Thanks to the high level of modularity, new products and product configurations can be seamlessly integrated into the existing system and existing production components can be replaced – to increase automation, for example. With the help of Eclipse BaSyx, Sartorius can focus on implementing the use cases themselves without having to deal in detail with the necessary Digital Twin infrastructure. Using Asset Administration Shells for the implementation, Sartorius can now directly leverage the added value of the BaSyx and Asset Administration Shell ecosystem and link many other third-party applications such as graphical user interfaces for Asset Administration Shells and the like. Thus, the system that has been created can be easily extended and is optimally equipped for the future requirements of new products and product variants as well as changes in the process.
This is what Alexander Karaus, Teamlead Automation and Process Technology T Satorius Lab Instruments GmbH & Co.KG, has to say:
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE