In manufacturing, many use cases of Industrie 4.0 require vendor-neutral and machine-interpretable information models to describe, implement and execute resource functions. Such models have been researched under the terms capabilities and skills. Standardization of such models is required, but currently not available. This paper presents a reference model developed jointly by members of various organizations in a working group of the Plattform Industrie 4.0. This model covers definitions of most important aspects of capabilities and skills. It can be seen as a basis for further standardization efforts.

One of the central concepts in the principles of Industry 4.0 relates to the methodology for designing and implementing the digital shell of the manufacturing process components. This concept, the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), embodies a systematically formed, standardized data envelope of a concrete component within Industry 4.0. The paper discusses the AAS in terms of its structure, its components, the sub-models that form a substantial part of the shell’s content, and its communication protocols (Open Platform Communication—Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and MQTT) or SW interfaces enabling vertical and horizontal communication to involve other components and levels of management systems. Using a case study of a virtual assembly line that integrates AASs into the technological process, the authors present a comprehensive analysis centered on forming AASs for individual components. In the given context, the manual AAS creation mode exploiting framework-based automated generation, which forms the AAS via a configuration wizard, is assessed. Another outcome consists of the activation of a virtual assembly line connected to real AASs, a step that allows us verify the properties of the distributed manufacturing management. Moreover, a discrete event system was modeled for the case study, enabling the effective application of the Industry 4.0 solution.

Interest in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) in the automation domain has seen a rapid increase both from the academia as well as the industry recent years. Since green field plants today are not common, the partial migration of plant automation to SOA design is needed to introduce new functionalities. Thus strategies and approaches for migration from legacy to SOA architectures becomes of vital interest. This paper discusses different views on partial migration of a process monitoring and control system from legacy to SOA. The discussion includes a global top down view, a bottom up view, hardware/software considerations and a hint on training of personnel.

In terms of fulfilling the customers' needs, Distributed Control Systems (DCS) have gained increasing significance for automation engineering over the past years. The advantages of DCS, e.g. enhanced dependability, flexibility and configurability, overcome various shortcomings of centralized control systems. However, engineering of heterogeneous networks lacks a modeling notation for automation and engineers and a tool support to calculate the time behavior. A notation for an intuitive and supplier independent specification of distributed automation systems is described, providing the opportunity to model real-time requirements and properties and to allow the comparison of different architectures regarding time behavior.