Description
Consider scenarios in which property values contain up-to-date actual/meassured values, i.e. the AAS acts as a gateway for online runtime data of the asset. An exemplary use case could work as follows:
- Device manufacturer supplies AAS for the asset which includes the device's connectivity information
- Integrator imports AAS into his automation engineering system and has now the necessary connectivity info to
- Integrator provides northbound server for online device data based on properties (including semanticID, etc.)
- In case of device change northbound application stays unchanged, but southbound to connectivity has to be re-engineered based on new device AAS.
The connectivity information should include:
a) Devicespecific communication endpoints: E.g. Protocol, DeviceName, Port, ...
b) For each property information necessary to uniquly address the information on the device: E.g. variable name, address/register, data length, device specific data type, acquisition mode, acquisition cycle, access mode, ...
c) An information that clearly identifies the respective properties as an "online" properties
Currently different approaches have been published:
- Qualifier to model above informations for each property (very informal, not standardised)
- Model each property as collection, which includes the actual property and additional properties which model the above information (complicated to parse, since for each property one has to check the environment)
Additionally, it has been proposed to enrich the property attributes to include the information b) (e.g. through templates additional to the IEC61360template, maybe even multiple inheritence in concept descriptions.)
Which approach should be used to guarentee multi-vendor-compability?