Automating the Development of Machine Skills and their Semantic Description

In order to approach the vision of quickly integrating new machines and their functionalities into a production plant, machines have to provide a machine-readable description of themselves and their functionalities. With such a description, it becomes possible to find required functions, check compatibility and, finally, execute production processes. In recent years, semantic web technologies have proven to be a promising enabler to realize such descriptions in the form of ontologies. But the creation of such an ontological description is an additional, tedious and error-prone task for a machine developer who might most likely not be an expert in semantic web technologies. In order to support developers in implementing machine function-alities as semantically described skills, we developed a method that highly automates all additional ontology-related tasks. The presented method makes use of information already contained in engineering artifacts, helps in adding additional information, and provides a framework to implement skill behavior. By using the proposed method, machine developers are put in a position to develop formal capability models themselves and with little additional effort.