The holistic implementation of a data-based evaluation of store floor assets (plants, machines, components) for the use of the resulting value creation represents, due to the high complexity and the required expertise in different disciplines, an enormous hurdle, especially for SMEs. It is necessary to select suitable data-based value-added services (VBS) for each relevant component in production, to provide data for their training and application, and finally to deploy the VBS in the given OT/IT infrastructure. Numerous companies are currently developing lighthouse projects that run through the necessary steps for individual components at high resource cost. However, these isolated solutions are not scalable due to the need for manual intervention. The goal of the project is therefore the complete automation of these steps and their consolidation into an Industrie 4.0 ecosystem that can be applied as a scalable overall package ("one-stop store" solution). To achieve this goal, all assets are extended to I4.0 components with a management shell so that VBS in particular can be called up via the standardized interface. I4.0 components can network highly dynamically and autonomously in a holistic ecosystem. The semantically enriched, machine-interpretable self-description of the management shells enables the automated orchestration of data flows and the preprocessing of data for the subsequent training of VBS with the aid of machine learning methods. Trained VBS can be deployed, applied, and maintained across IT tiers (edge device, edge cloud, public cloud) in an automated deployment by automatically matching their requirements to the capabilities of each tier.

Initial situation and problem definition The holistic implementation of a data-based evaluation of store floor assets (plants, machines, components) to exploit the resulting value creation is, due to the high complexity and the required expertise in different disciplines, an enormous hurdle, especially for SMEs. It is necessary to select suitable data-based value-added services (VBS) for each relevant component in production, to provide data for their training and application, and finally to deploy the VBS in the given OT/IT infrastructure. Numerous companies are currently developing lighthouse projects that run through the necessary steps for individual components at high resource cost. However, these isolated solutions are not scalable due to the manual interventions required.

The goal of the project is therefore to fully automate these steps and merge them into an Industrie 4.0 ecosystem that can be applied as a scalable overall package ("one-stop store" solution). To achieve this goal, all assets are extended to I4.0 components with a management shell so that VBS in particular can be called up via the standardized interface. I4.0 components can network highly dynamically and autonomously in a holistic ecosystem. The semantically enriched, machine-interpretable self-description of the management shells enables the automated orchestration of data flows and the preprocessing of data for the subsequent training of VBS with the aid of machine learning methods. Trained VBS can be deployed, applied, and maintained across IT tiers (edge device, edge cloud, public cloud) in an automated deployment by automatically matching their requirements to the capabilities of each tier.

An Industry 4.0 ecosystem represents an opportunity for companies to quickly and cost-effectively implement product service systems (for component manufacturers or machine builders) or production service systems (manufacturing companies). In addition, this interoperable ecosystem enables the autonomy of production by allowing production equipment to book services for itself as required in order to autonomously derive its own actions for resilient in-house operation based on data from the machine learning processes.

With regard to the exploitation of the results, the consortium is aiming for a user community in the environment of the it's OWL Cluster so that companies can use the ecosystem and start directly with the actual development of value-adding services. This enables participation in the results of the project, regardless of the size of the company.

The development and provision of the Industry 4.0 ecosystem represents a decisive competitive advantage for the cluster region, as the technological framework for future data-based business models in terms of product/production service systems is available centrally as part of the it's OWL innovation ecosystem and does not have to be developed individually by each company. The companies in OWL can start from a higher level of innovation.