The FA³ST Service is being developed by Fraunhofer IOSB as part of the Fraunhofer Advanced Asset Administration Shell Tools for Digital Twins (FA³ST), a collection of tools for modeling, creating and using digital twins based on the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) specification. It is published as open source under Apache 2.0 license (GitHub – FraunhoferIOSB/FAAAST-Service: FA³ST – Fraunhofer Advanced Asset Administration Shell Tools (for Digital Twins) ) and will soon be realized as an Eclipse FA³ST project (Eclipse FA³ST ).
The FA³ST Service is an implementation of the re-active or type 2 AAS, which means you can load existing AAS models and interact with them via API. The FA³ST Service focuses on AASs on the edge, meaning synchronizing assets and AAS is a central aspect. The protocol-agnostic definition allows the FA³ST Service to be integrated with any kind of communication protocol and by using different interaction patterns. The FA³ST Service provides out-of-the-box support for different protocols (e.g. OPC UA, HTTP and MQTT) that can be used without writing any code.
For communication with the outside world, digital twins realized with the FA³ST Service offer a standardized AAS-compliant DT API which currently can be used based on HTTP, OPC UA, or both at the same time.
The FA³ST Service also focuses on easy usage for non-expert users while at the same time offering an open architecture which allows for easy extension of functionality. It can be used via CLI, docker, or as embedded Java library and offers multiple means for configuration.
As part of the MODAPTO project, the FA³ST service has been extended with the capability to execute different types of logic or algorithms within a digital twin. Currently, we provide support for Functional Mock-Up Units, i.e. concrete simulation logic based on the FMI standard. The FA³ST service is able to load AAS models following the AAS submodel template “Provision of Simulation Models” containing FMU files and to invoke the simulation algorithm contained in these files via the standardized AAS API.”