Plattform Industrie 4.0 defines the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) information model, which is described in the document series “Asset Administration Shell in Detail” [1, 2, 3]. These documents are available in the library of Plattform Industrie 4.0.

The aim of the Asset Administration Shells is to enable partners in value creation networks to exchange meaningful information by conforming to a specified set of standardized information elements. Furthermore, Asset Administration Shells will be capable to interact with each other directly without a leading system and connecting them to a cloud infrastructure in a standardized way.

Plattform Industrie 4.0 recommends ECLASS as the preferred dictionary of standardized semantic to create meaningful Asset Administration Shells or Digital Twins. The AAS has standardized the structure and ECLASS has standardized the semantics for information elements, which should be used for the definition of digital twins. The structure of the AAS and the ECLASS dictionary complement each other in a perfect manner to achieve this objective.

The objective of this whitepaper is to work out which structures of ECLASS can be used to define the semantics of structures of the AAS. This whitepaper therefore explores element by element how each element of the AAS can be semantically described within the means of the ECLASS Conceptual Data Model.