Event-Driven Method for Automated Compliance Testing of Submodels

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Asset Administration Shells (AAS) and their associated submodels, which are essential components of Industry 4.0 are designed to ensure compliance and interoperability. It is crucial that AAS must be seamlessly integrated and compliant with industry standards for users in industrial manufacturing. As submodels serve as the core components of the AAS, ensuring their compliance with relevant standards is imperative. The manual validation process of submodels can be complex, time-consuming, and error-prone. This work builds on a previously developed framework that introduced recursive validation mechanisms, flexible input handling (including direct JSON input, API-based links, and file uploads for AAS and submodels), and adherence to Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA) submodel standards. In this paper, we extend the framework by incorporating real-time, MQTT-based event detection to enable automated validation of submodel updates. Furthermore, the proposed system supports the validation of multiple submodels within a single AAS as well as multiple AASs in parallel, enabling large-scale conformity testing. The test results are communicated to the user through an intuitive and user-friendly interface designed to support engineers and IT departments. Evaluation demonstrates that the system maintains an optimal validation time even as the number of tested submodels increases, ensuring the potential for large-scale use. This research improves the efficiency and accuracy of digital twin management, a key concern of Industry 4.0.