A Formal Capability and Skill Model for Use in Plug and Produce Scenarios

Manufacturing companies face an environment that is dominated by influences which affect the usage of their manufacturing equipment. Trends like shortening life cycles of products, increasing numbers of product variants and the resulting decrease in lot sizes put pressure on companies’ operations. Existing machines have to be adaptable to provide a high degree of flexibility and new machines have to be easily integrated into an existing plant in a plug and produce fashion. Research contributions that focus on a higher level description of machine functionalities are seen as a promising approach to cope with the aforementioned challenges. While there exists quite a large amount of contributions on this topic, these contributions focus either on formal models or on executable functions. The developed models mostly represent project specific contents and are rarely based on industry standards.In this contribution, we present an approach to a formal model of machine capabilities that directly includes a description of executable skills. The presented capability and skill model is based on a variety of separate so-called ontology design patterns that contain the vocabulary of industry standards and therefore provide a profound knowledge which is agreed upon by a large community. In addition to the description of our model, this contribution shows how these models can be used in order to achieve simple and rapid integration of new manufacturing modules and their capabilities.