CanvAAS – bridging a fragmented industry landscape
EIT Manufacturing’s CanVAAs project aims to bridge a fragmented industry landscape and accelerate digitalisation by providing a common standard and training methodology to facilitate a smooth transition to industry 4.0.
Ensuring the interoperability of industrial equipment, so that industrial machines “speak the same language”, is important for accelerating and facilitating the transition to industry 4.0. across Europe. Beyond enabling machines to communicate seamlessly, common standards that allow interoperability enable new levels of automation and increased productivity. Unfortunately, there is a lack of user-friendly tools with a guided methodology for training workers in factories to deploy the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) for increased interoperability.
CanvAAS promotes the AAS as a unique common software standard for machine interoperability and provides user-friendly, educational tools to help build a solid understanding of how the standard works, thereby accelerating the transformation to industry 4.0. As an additional benefit, CanvAAS will be available under an open-source license through the Eclipse Foundation, making the solution free to use for almost any purpose, including commercial purposes.
The CanvAAS toolset will be available in the Eclipse platform, where it will be published as a component of the Eclipse Papyrus project.
CanvAAS toolset
The Asset Administration Shell is the most promising standard to ensure interoperability and to implement the digital twin approach. CanvAAS is providing an easy-to-use software toolset that will empower the adoption of the standard within the I4.0 community.
Saadia DHUIB, Project Manager, CEA List
Project Consortium:
- Technology providers: CEA List and DFKI. They built an innovative software solution (CanvAAS toolset) that was tested and validated by POLIMI (Industry 4.0 experimental facilities).
- Experimental production line: Whirlpool & POLIMI
- Business champions: Festo Didactic & Sherpa Engineering. FESTO tested the CanvAAS toolset on a Robotino based scenario, and they are integrating the CanvAAS toolset in their product portfolio of Learning Systems for Industry 4.0.
The EIT Manufacturing support helped to produce a new open-source toolset that is expected to increase the adoption of the AAS standard and subsequently foster flexible and inter-operable production systems for competitive manufacturing. EIT funding allowed for transforming the idea into a tangible outcome, which can now be deployed and shared on a larger scale thanks to the Open-Source philosophy and the EIT Manufacturing ecosystem.
Saadia Dhouib, Project Manager, CEA List