Towards a Stateful Capability-Skill Ontology for Scheduling in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

The manufacturing industry is currently facing a need for more dynamic modes of production. To meet this demand, this work presents an architecture that flexibly connects products, processes, and resources. This work also proposes stateful capability-skill ontology that allows abstract production steps to be dynamically matched to machines on the shop floor. Unlike previous work, state information is directly encoded into the ontology's structure, which simplifies the capability-skill matching process. With an architectural analysis of the work-in-progress approach, its suitability and utility for scheduling tasks is assessed. The initial results show that the proposed approach can provide efficient, reliable, and interoperable scheduling for various scenarios, whereas resource usage and retroactive capability decomposition are identified as potential weaknesses.