One of the key concepts of the initiative Industrie 4.0 is the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). First implementations of the AAS and mappings to various technologies are available. Nevertheless, a comprehen-sive view from a functional point of view that also includes the whole system environment into is still missing.

On the one hand, this is necessary such that a broad community may better understand the objectives of this concept and is there-fore able to generate benefits from its us-age. On the other hand, it is fundamentally and systematically required in order to ana-lyze and conceptualize non-functional re-quirements such as IT security and privacy, following the “security by design” and “pri-vacy by design” principles.
This document was developed from De-cember 2019 to April 2021 by sub working group “Infrastructure of the Asset Admin-istration Shell” and reviewed by sub working group “Asset Administration Shell” of Plat-form Industrie 4.0 working group “Reference Architectures, Standards and Norms“.
It extends the Usage View of an Administra-tion Shell document with a corresponding Functional View.
The Editors would like to thank all partici-pants in the discussions to develop and re-view this document.