Combining Publicly Available SDKs and Code Generation Tools to Streamline the Implementation of AAS Applications

The developer community has made significant efforts to enable fast and resilient implementations of industrial applications centred around the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). Software Developer Kits (SDKs) help industry and academia to streamline the development process and reduce errors when working with the AAS metamodel or serving the AAS API. In this work, we analyze established SDKs and other supporting tools that facilitate the development of AAS SDKs and applications. We introduce four workflows with varying degrees of automation that leverage these tools, discussing both current and anticipated challenges related to code generation, along with effective mitigation strategies. These workflows are qualitatively compared regarding their implementation and management effort, required skills, correctness, as well as future-proof maintainability. Based on six study cases of real-world AAS implementations, we ascertain the extent to which these workflows are already being applied in practice.