The terms "digitalization" and "networking" are on everyone's lips these days and do not stop at industry. Quite the opposite: they are an essential part of the current fourth industrial revolution. BaSys, an open source Eclipse project, provides the central technology for this.
This article deals with the use of BaSys 4.0 in the company, using the example of the smart factory consulting product "shopfloor 4.0". After explaining this possible application, the work of BaSys 4.0 in production is explained in technical terms.
How do BaSys 4.0 and shopfloor 4.0 make a factory smart?
We can already track our own bodies, live in a smart home and plan our coffee consumption. So it comes as no surprise that industry also requires an equally good overview of products and, in particular, their manufacturing processes. Fraunhofer IESE, NetApp and objective partner are making an important contribution to this with shopfloor 4.0 and its use of BaSys.
The goals that can be achieved thanks to shopfloor 4.0 include production optimization, better traceability and a more efficient process. It will be possible to produce even individual items without great effort and to view the entire production process continuously in the UI of shopfloor 4.0. Business data from SAP is also included.
To achieve this, the various machines in production are now to be connected, digitally controlled and monitored. objective partner's shopfloor 4.0 offers the solution to link all machines and also establish a direct connection to the office floor, among other things. SAP processes already in use in the company are also connected. BaSys provides the middleware for linking the individual machines.
How does BaSys, the new IOT solution for industry, work?
shopfloor Through BaSys, 4.0 specifically pursues the approach of the digital twin, i.e. an exact digital image of every product, every machine and every other element involved in the process. This makes it possible, for example, to order and store materials automatically and as efficiently as possible, and to have machines control themselves in response to small fluctuations in the materials. The digital twins are clearly displayed in shopfloor 4.0. This enables the flexible adjustment and monitoring of details in products and the components involved in their manufacturing process.
In the context of BaSys, the term digital twin is generally synonymous with the "Asset Administration Shell" (AAS). An administration shell comprises several "submodels", which display the respective information on the represented object in a structured manner. This information can be, for example, a construction plan for the product to be manufactured, current measurement data such as temperature or energy consumption.
How does BaSys work in production?
The middleware used in shopfloor is the open source Eclipse project "BaSyx" from Fraunhofer IESE (Institute for Experimental Software Engineering), which implements the conceptual idea of the BaSys project. The illustration shows the most important components of BaSyx and their connection to the elements of the production process in a highly simplified form. The system shopfloor 4.0 is based on and an extension of this architecture.
At the bottom are the real entities, such as workers, machines and materials. These are mapped in BaSyx in an asset administration shell, i.e. a digital twin with their properties and information in the form of submodels. Each submodel itself can in turn contain a number of different attributes with assigned values.
The advantage of the AAS is the standardized, analog display. This covers devices and manufacturers and can therefore be used in any company. The granulation can still be defined individually by the submodels.
The individual administration shells register in a "directory" in which they can be found quickly and easily via a "discovery" service.
All these elements are connected to the "Virtual Automation Bus" (VAB). The VAB represents the central communication option. It also enables the connection of application runtime environments for control via BPMN, for example.
Internal communication via the VAB takes place using HTTP REST. The great advantage of the Virtual Automation Bus is that the translation effort for the exchange between different protocols is significantly reduced. In each case, there only needs to be a mapping of the respective protocol to HTTP and one for the opposite direction, instead of a direct translation from each individual protocol to every other protocol. BaSyx focuses on the elementary operations create, read, update, delete and invoke.
How can I use the BaSyx Eclipse project?
As BaSyx is an open source project, anyone can clone the code from the Git repository (git clone https://git.eclipse.org/r/basyx/basyx). There are essentially three parts: SDK, components and examples. The SDK is available for various programming languages, the components and examples are currently only available for Java.
All important elements such as the administration shells, submodels and the directory can be found in the SDK. There are also connectors to connect the elements to the VAB.
Components contains a number of other ready-made useful modules, such as the basics for using SQL and XML.
Finally, the examples provide very good orientation for the concrete implementation of a system in many respects.
What does objective partner do with BaSys?
Together with Fraunhofer-IESE and NetApp, our aim is to offer a ready-to-use system, shopfloor 4.0, which makes it easy to implement Industry 4.0 in your own company. With this system, your own company takes an important step forward in the area of digitalization.
objective partner will provide the implementation of shopfloor 4.0, based on BaSyx, for certain customers. We will also be responsible for integrating the components we develop with the components and machines that the customers have in operation. However, objective partner's contribution to Industry 4.0 will not only be the development of various standard components, such as the "Asset Administration Shell" for the machines, but also specific configurable components, such as front-end applications and the connection of new and already deployed SAP systems.
