An integrated framework for manufacturing automation based on capabilities and skills

EN: Modern manufacturing systems must adapt to an increasing variety of product variants and dynamic conditions. This requires flexible integration, modification, and replacement of machines, which necessitates computer-interpretable descriptions of their functions. These descriptions are essential for interoperability and automated manufacturing planning. In research, capabilities and skills have been established as key concepts. In this context, capabilities describe implementation-independent specifications of functions in industrial production, whereas skills represent the executable and encapsulated implementations of these functions. This dissertation presents a unified framework that addresses existing research gaps and systematically integrates capabilities and skills into both the engineering and operation of manufacturing systems. First, an ontology is introduced that semantically links both concepts and ensures a high degree of reusability through the use of established standards. An engineering methodology enables the largely automated creation of capabilities and skills. In addition, a planning approach is presented that generates manufacturing processes based on available capabilities, thereby ensuring high adaptability to changing manufacturing systems. Finally, an orchestration and execution methodology is introduced that automatically executes planned processes using skills. The developed framework has been prototypically implemented and evaluated in different application scenarios. The results show that capabilities and skills can be efficiently created, manufacturing processes can be automatically planned, and their execution can be orchestrated using the framework. This work thus makes a systematic contribution to the flexible and automated utilization of machine capabilities in modern manufacturing.