Flexible communication configuration on field-level in a skill-based manufacturing environment

To transition industrial production lines from mass production to lot-size-one production, it is essential to achieve modularization and flexibility throughout the entire production process. For this to be feasible abilities of production resources need to be defined in a manufacturer independent generalized way. This requirement has led to the development of the Capability-Skill-Service model. While current research primarily focuses on production steps, it is crucial not to overlook the importance of flexible communication between production resources. This paper presents an approach to defining network configuration at the field-level in a skill-based manufacturing environment. For this, the abilities to reconfigure communication as well as the ability to be reconfigured are modeled as capabilities and skills. Within the framework of Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture Field eXchange (OPC UA FX), a ConnectionManager entity operates at the field-level to facilitate the reconfiguration of OPC UA communication between AutomationComponents. The presented approach is evaluated using the configuration abilities of the ConnectionManager.