Skill-based Engineering Approach using OPC UA Programs

Kirill Dorofeev and Alois Zoitl

IEEE 16th International Conference of Industrial Informatics (INDIN),

June 2018

abstract

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.