The Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA) and the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance (OI4) are cooperating to drive forward the industrial networking of industry. In the declaration of intent for close cooperation, the aim of the collaboration is the further digitalization of industry based on the Asset Administration Shell, or AAS for short.

Both organizations are pursuing the vision of interoperability, i.e. that different industrial systems such as production machines and software solutions can work together digitally and seamlessly. While IDTA, with its focus on definitions, provides the basic technology in the form of specifications and standardized submodels, OI4 builds on these definitions and, as an implementation alliance, carries out implementation projects within the open ecosystem with its 92 members.

As part of the cooperation, IDTA and OI4 are working on further developing the digital twin so that it can be used as an open and interoperable solution. The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) serves as the basis for this. The AAS infrastructure enables this open exchange on both a technical and semantic level. The established standards create an open ecosystem that is suitable for industrial greenfield and brownfield plants.

With its members from the electrical industry, mechanical engineering and the software industry, the IDTA is driving the development process of the AAS with the aim of making it available to every company internationally. The technological foundation of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance is an open architecture based on RAMI 4.0, which is based on the four building blocks Device Connectivity, Edge, Operator Cloud and Cloud Central as well as a corresponding range of services.

Around 17 pilot projects from the member companies of both organizations. They show how the concepts of IDTA and OI4 complement each other in practice and are technically easy to implement.