Objective
The Production Connectivity Model acts as the digital twin of the physical world. Its entities represent machines, facilities, transportation, or other physical means that enable shop floor processes. These entities are called assets in the Production Connectivity Model.
The Asset Model serves as an abstraction layer between the automation or control side and manufacturing applications. The production engineer does not need to know details about the control layer and, in turn, the automation engineer does not need to know details about the data usage. Both sides can be changed in any way if the mapping between them remains stable. Using the Asset Model, production engineers or production operators can use manufacturing applications (for example, SAP Digital Manufacturing for insights and SAP Digital Manufacturing for execution) to work with the asset in the same way as if they were handling the physical machine. For example, if the production supervisor or operator wants to read the temperature of an oven, they can read the temperature of the oven equipment in the SAP Digital Manufacturing asset. If they want to change the temperature, they can enter the target temperature in SAP Digital Manufacturing as a set point to the related indicator.
The asset reflects all aspects of its physical counterpart that are necessary to describe and run shop floor processes. These are as follows:
The following diagram illustrates an example of a nested structure:
Robot_XYZ is the root structure with the following entities:
Axis is a substructure with the following entities:
Spindle_Structure is a substructure with the following entities:
Measuring_Data is a substructure with the following entities:
Vibration_Data is a substructure with the following entities:
It makes sense to create structures like this in SAP Digital Manufacturing for your assets. An asset can be created in SAP Digital Manufacturing in the Manage Assets app.
Note
In most cases, it is not necessary to build up the complete asset structure of the physical machine when creating an asset in SAP Digital Manufacturing. You should save time and effort and only configure the required structure elements in the asset.
Note
It is necessary to specify an asset type when creating an asset in SAP Digital Manufacturing. The asset type acts as a template. A new asset type can be created during the asset creation process or you can reuse an existing asset type. The asset type defines the structure of the asset. The benefit of creating and using asset types is that they can be assigned to many different assets. This means that the same structure can be used in many assets with less configuration effort.
Note
It is necessary to define different references in the asset structure when creating an asset in SAP Digital Manufacturing. There are references for examples of structure elements or for indicators. The so-called references serve as IDs for the structure elements. That means that the reference name is the name of an indicator within an asset (unique ID), while the name of the indicator you see on the Asset Configuration screen is available for all assets.
In many cases, when it comes to production execution in SAP Digital Manufacturing, it is not the asset itself but the resource that is used for bookings in the system. When an operator uses the Production Operator Dashboard (POD) interface to interact with SAP Digital Manufacturing in combination with machine integration, it is especially necessary to map assets to resources in the Manage Resources app. The reason for this is that the operator only has the resource available in the POD. If actions are to be triggered from the POD to the physical machine, the mapping must be implemented. In most cases, there is a one-to-one relationship between assets and resources in SAP Digital Manufacturing.