Challenges and research agenda for realizing a seamless integration of Digital Shadows into the production domain

Abstract One vision of industry 4.0 is an autonomous shopfloor configuration. A possibility to transfer this vision to reality is realizable with Digital Shadows. As Digital Shadows are well defined in research, challenges for seamless integration in production are still an open research topic. The main challenge is the enrichment of semantics on the domain in a standardized format that enables multilateral communication between all assets. To overcome these challenge, tools have to be developed to support domain experts in building and integrating Digital Shadows without knowledge of modeling and programming. This article demonstrates the main challenges of this objective and proposes a research agenda to close this research gap.