Shell groups

Shell groups are an additional offer to the Digital Twin Registry users of Bosch Semantic Stack. Shell groups allow to structure a (large) set of Asset Administration Shells, possibly with very similar Submodels (aspects).

A Shell group is an entity in the Digital Twin Registry to which a Shell may be related. A Shell may be a member in several Shell groups.

For each tenant, each Shell group must have a unique name. Additionally, the group can have a textual description.

For each Shell group there might be attached up to 50 Submodel Templates. See also Submodel Templates for further information about managing Submodel Templates.

Managing Shell groups

Shell groups have their own REST resource that offers the corresponding CRUD operations to create, retrieve, update, or delete a Shell group.

Refer to the description of the Shell Group endpoint externallink 20 in the API docs.

The Update and Patch REST operations affect the name and description of an existing Shell group and do not allow to change the set of Submodel Templates attached to the group. For de-attaching or attaching Submodel templates to Shell groups, please follow details described at this page: Submodel Templates.

Relating Shells and Shell groups

The relation of a Shell with one or more Shell groups is managed solely via the Asset Administration Shell Registry endpoint externallink 20 , which is used for all Shell and submodel descriptor operations.

Its Registration endpoint allows to register a Shell with a list of Shell groups.
The Update endpoint allows to modify the set of Shell groups in which a Shell is a member.