Digital Twin in Industrial Applications – How Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and Asset Administration Shell (AAS) complement each other

In the development, production and usage of cyber-physical systems, the number of stakeholders, involved interfaces and volatile environmental conditions is constantly rising. In addition, use cases require more consideration of the entire system life cycle. This significantly increases the administration effort and forms a barrier for the digital transformation of industrial companies. While model-based systems engineering (MBSE) addresses internal challenges within the product development and Asset Administration Shell (AAS) addresses vendor independent information exchange and interoperability, both approaches need to be coupled to address today’s challenges. In this publication typical tasks within product development are discussed: “search the right information”, “integrate the right information” and “provide the right information”. It is shown how they were approached today, without the alignment of MBSE and AAS, what technological concepts exists to address the challenges and how the tasks are realized by an alignment of MBSE and AAS.