The Asset Administration Shell is the Industrie 4.0 standard for an industrial digital twin, maintained by the Industrial Digital Twin Association. It defines a metamodel of shells, submodels and concept descriptions, and a set of HTTP/REST APIs published as OpenAPI.
Asset Administration Shell
The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is the digital twin of an industrial asset, from a sensor to a whole production line. It came out of the German Industrie 4.0 program, is maintained by the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA), and is being standardized internationally as IEC 63278.
- Metamodel (Part 1) - A shell describes one asset and holds submodels, each covering one aspect such as technical data, nameplate or carbon footprint. Concept descriptions give each property a shared meaning.
- Submodel templates - The IDTA publishes templates so that a nameplate or a handover document looks the same whichever vendor produced it.
- API (Part 2) - The REST interfaces are published as OpenAPI under CC BY 4.0: shell and submodel services, repositories, registries, discovery, concept descriptions and an AASX file server. Release 3.2.0 shipped on 2026-07-21.
- Serializations - The metamodel ships as JSON Schema, XSD and RDF, plus the AASX package format.
Of the industrial standards, this is the one that is already an API. It is the data model underneath Catena-X and the Digital Product Passport work, which makes it the clearest bridge between factory data and the API economy.
Industry: Manufacturing
