Advancing Manufacturing Interoperability with the Modular Digital Thread

In today’s digital manufacturing landscape, secure and seamless data exchange across the entire value network is essential. This is particularly critical in Circular Economy (CE) strategies, where informed decision-making relies on historical product data that must be accessible, traceable, and integrated into a comprehensive Digital Twin representation. Achieving this requires a holistic Digital Thread approach, one that seamlessly connects manufacturing, product, and business data across multiple systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and shop-floor sensors.

To address interoperability challenges, manufacturing ecosystems have traditionally relied on IoT connectors like OPC UA and MQTT, along with standardized information models such as the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) (IEC 63278-1). Aligned with the RAMI 4.0 framework and promoted by Plattform Industrie 4.0, the AAS enables secure and standardized data sharing, ensuring semantic consistency across heterogeneous industrial environments.

As part of the DaCapo project, a Modular Digital Thread (MDT) has been developed to enhance manufacturing data interoperability. This product-centered data management scheme implements a digital pipeline, linking Product, Process, and Resources (PPR model) to enable seamless data collection, transmission, and sharing across different engineering tools. The MDT offers a modular, hierarchical, and sector-agnostic approach, ensuring that diverse industrial use cases can efficiently interconnect and leverage heterogeneous data sources.

Furthermore, the MDT plays a key role in enabling the Digital Product Passport (DPP), which facilitates sustainability tracking, regulatory compliance, and circular economy strategies. By leveraging advanced interoperability solutions, industries can enhance efficiency, foster collaboration, and drive data-driven innovation.

To support engineers and operators in leveraging this technology, AIMEN Technology Centre has developed an intuitive web-based application (https://mdt.dacapo-project.eu/), designed to streamline data integration and visualization. The tool enables users to trace information dynamically, simply by dragging and dropping components within the interface to construct complex workflows. Built to be industry- and sector-agnostic, the application imposes no restrictions on the type of data registered, whether metadata or large-format files.

Following the PPR model, the tool allows users to map manufacturing processes, specifying the necessary resources for execution, including software, consumables, and other production assets. The entire graphical representation of the digital workflow is automatically translated into an Asset Administration Shell (AAS) model and uploaded to an AAS Server (e.g., Eclipse BaSyx in the DaCapo project), adhering to the PPR schema and following IDTA’s latest recommendations and templates. The resulting AAS model is structured into four main submodels: Identification, BillOfMaterials, TechnicalData, and ProductLifecycle.