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Project
Proposal

Eclipse FA³ST

Monday, November 27, 2023 - 03:55 by Michael Jacoby
This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the community. Please login and add your feedback in the comments section.
Project
Parent Project
Proposal State
Created
Background

The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is the standardized digital representation of the asset, corner stone of the interoperability between the applications managing the manufacturing systems. AAS identifies the Administration Shell and the assets represented by it, holds digital models of various aspects (submodels) and describes technical functionality exposed by the Administration Shell or respective assets. Core elements of AAS are the metamodels and serializations, APIs, and security.

Scope

Eclipse FA³ST aims to provide an implementation of the re-active (or type 2) Asset Administration Shell according to the AAS specification.

This includes the following aspects:

  • AAS APIs, especially AAS & Submodel API, Repository API, and Registry API
  • AAS metamodel as defined in Part 2
  • JSON De-/Serialization including all content modifiers such as $value, $metadata, or $reference
  • Asset Synchronization

Implementation of the metamodel as defined in AAS specification Part 1 as well as basic de-/serialization (i.e. content modifier $normal) are out-of-scope of this project. This functionality will be provided by re-using Eclipse AAS4J.

Description

Eclipse FA³ST aims to provide an implementation of the re-active (or type 2) Asset Administration Shell according to the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) specification by Plattform Industrie 4.0.  In contrast to other implementations such as Eclipse BaSyx, Eclipse FA³ST will focus on the deployment at edge-level rather than cloud-level, meaning that its primary focus will be on asset connectivity rather than scalability. Other expected key features are

  • Easy to set-up & use
  • Open architecture which enables easy customization and extension
  • Implementation of API for HTTP and OPC UA
  • Protocol-agnostic synchronization with assets
  • Usage via command-line interface, docker container, and as embedded library
Why Here?

The Eclipse Foundation provides a professional environment (governance, licensing, intellectual property management) for the future development of Eclipse FA³ST. These advantages facilitate the usage of an open source, extensible ecosystem and helps the software to gain more visibility in the AAS community and beyond.

Furthermore, Eclipse FA³ST nicely integrates with existing Eclipse projects in the AAS domain such as Eclipse BaSyx and Eclipse AAS4J that are already part of the Eclipse Digital Twin Top-Level Project.

Future Work

Eclipse FA³ST wants to build an open source community in Eclipse to coordinate the building of an extensible ecosystem in which manufacturers and suppliers, including the providers of applications, platforms and infrastructure, can all participate equally.

Concrete next steps will include features like generic handling of SubmodelTemplates, i.e. to manage time series data within an AAS according the the SubmodelTemplate TimeSeriesData specification.

Project Scheduling

Eclipse FA³ST and its involved parties intend to move to Eclipse as soon as possible. The plan is to release v1.0 of the software under the existing FA³ST project and then transfer the repositories to the new Eclipse FA³ST project and continue development there.

Interested Parties
  • Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft e. V.
  • Industrial Digital Twin Association e. V.
  • Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V.
  • Deutsche Nickel GmbH
  • EKS InTec GmbH
  • KETI (Korea Electronics Technology Institute)
  • MHP Management- und IT-Beratung GmbH
  • NTNU - Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet
  • SAP SE
  • SINTEF AS
  • Teknopar Industrial Automation
  • University of Piraeus Research Center
Initial Contribution

Currently the project exists in two separate repositories under the FraunhoferIOSB organization on Github which are considered as initial contribution to this project

https://github.com/FraunhoferIOSB/FAAAST-Service

https://github.com/FraunhoferIOSB/FAAAST-Registry

 

We intend to create a new project-related Github organization (as the current one is affiliated with Fraunhofer) and transfer the repositories there.

Source Repository Type