Capabilities and skills for manufacturing planning in an automotive use case scenario

Abstract

The necessity for increased flexibility in production and handling of high-variant product families is a strong trend in Industry 4.0 scenarios. A promising approach to achieve this is to replace the rigid programming of the manufacturing management systems by a declarative description of machines and their functionality. This allows for a dynamic allocation of tasks to resources. This paper reports the ongoing work on applying the concept of capabilities and skills to an industrial application example in order to investigate its potential benefits. To apply the abstract concept of capabilities and skills to the production scenario it is implemented using specific technologies. These include Semantic Web ontologies, constraint solving methods and OPC UA for skill invocation and communication.