Skill-based Engineering Approach using OPC UA Programs

The modern manufacturing and production systems are changing into a flexible factory layout that raises a demand for distributed control systems, where various components from different vendors communicating over their capabilities (skills) to execute a production task. This paper offers a way of how the skills, offered by an automation system component, can be represented using a generic interface to allow the higher control levels to easily orchestrate the skills available in the system and control their execution in the runtime. We show how a skill can be modeled using a Finite State Machine and present a concrete example how the concept can be realized by means of the OPC UA communication protocol.