Manufacturers face the challenge of efficient data management when operating a heterogeneous system environment, including numerous devices. The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) realizes the concept of Digital Twins as a solution to establish the required interoperability among the different data sources by defining interaction models and abstractions for handling, representing, and accessing information.
The Eclipse BaSyx project implements the AAS specification to utilize the benefits of the abstraction layer introduced by the AAS.
Eclipse Ditto is an established IoT backend offering abstraction by collecting the latest known state from connected devices in a so-called Thing. The data of many of these devices and Things are also relevant to enable more use cases with an AAS infrastructure. Connecting Eclipse Ditto as a data source for Eclipse BaSyx is more promising than re-integrating the devices directly with Eclipse BaSyx. The reason is that the integration re-uses the existing connection between the devices and Eclipse Ditto, and there thus is no need to modify every single device.
In the talk, we introduce AAS, Eclipse BaSyx, and Eclipse Ditto. We then present and compare different evaluated architectural approaches for the integration and highlight our current solution for making Eclipse Ditto Things available within an Eclipse BaSyx AAS environment.