A skill is defined as the ability of a resource to perform a process. Skills are thus the relation of process and resource, enriched with additional information.

J. Pfrommer, M. Schleipen and J. Beyerer, "PPRS: Production skills and their relation to product, process, and resource," 2013 IEEE 18th Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation (ETFA), Cagliari, 2013, pp. 1-4 [DOI]

By definition, Skill is the ability to perform actions that are then needed to support the manufacturing process. Skills can have different abstraction levels, i.e. a complex Skill is generated through the aggregation of other skills, basic/or complex ones.

G. Cândido, J. Barata: A Multiagent Control System for Shop Floor Assembly. In: Mařík, Vyatkin, Colombo (Hrsg.): Holonic and multi-agent systems for manufacturing: Third International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems, HoloMAS 2007, Regensburg, Germany, September 3 - 5, 2007 ; proceedings. Berlin: Springer (Lecture notes in computer science Lecture notes in artificial intelligence, 4659), Vol. 4659, S. 293–302, 2007. [Springer Link]

Fähigkeit (skill): Ein Skill s ∈ S beschreibt das technische Potenzial einer Ressource r ∈ R, einen bestimmten Prozess π ∈ Π umzusetzen.

J. Pfrommer, M. Schleipen, J. Beyerer: Fähigkeiten adaptiver Produktionsanlagen. Atp-Edition, Vol. 55 (11), 2013, S. 42–49. [ResearchGate]

Skill: A finite state machine (FSM), in which each state runs one single of the above-mentioned motions, and the termination condition of the motion in that state gives rise to a state transition. The FSMs always start in the init state. One FSM can have multiple final states, of which FullyAssembled is one; other final states are the envisioned error conditions. The discrete states in a skill are a superset of the states in the task’s assembly graph, or rather, the task is also an FSM but with many different hierarchically nested skill FSMs.

A. Björkelund, H. Bruyninckx, J. Malec, K. Nilsson, P. Nugues: Knowledge for Intelligent Industrial Robots. In: George Konidaris (Hrsg.): AAAI Technical Report SS-12-02, Designing Intelligent Robots: Reintegrating AI: AAAI, SS-12-02, 2012. [PDF-Link]

Skill: Skills refers to a type of manufacturing, logistics or other production related process (such as information exchange, retooling, etc.) and provide the structure for describing these processes in their respective domain. Skills form a hierarchy where derived skills inherit the attributes of their parent. As an example, arc-welding would be derived from welding, inheriting the temperature attribute.

J. Pfrommer, D. Stogl, K. Aleksandrov, V. Schubert, B. Hein: Modelling and orchestration of service-based manufacturing systems via skills. In: IEEE [International Conference on] Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), 2014: 16 - 19 Sept. 2014, Barcelona, Spain. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, S. 1–4, 2014. [IEEExplore-Link]

Asset skill: An asset skill is the instantiation of a skill. It indicates the ability of a specific asset to execute the skill under the constraints described in the attributes. For example a welding robot would indicate a range for the temperature attribute specified in the welding skill it implements. A drilling machine could use this mechanism to describe the different materials and drill diameters it currently supports.

J. Pfrommer, D. Stogl, K. Aleksandrov, V. Schubert, B. Hein: Modelling and orchestration of service-based manufacturing systems via skills. In: IEEE [International Conference on] Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), 2014: 16 - 19 Sept. 2014, Barcelona, Spain. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, S. 1–4, 2014. [IEEExplore-Link]

Production skill: A production skill gives the requirements that an asset must fulfill in order to execute a product transformation. Note that production skills state necessary requirements an asset must fulfill to be compatible. But they are not sufficient to guarantuee successful execution without additional information.

J. Pfrommer, D. Stogl, K. Aleksandrov, V. Schubert, B. Hein: Modelling and orchestration of service-based manufacturing systems via skills. In: IEEE [International Conference on] Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), 2014: 16 - 19 Sept. 2014, Barcelona, Spain. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, S. 1–4, 2014. [IEEExplore-Link]

Executable skill: An executable skill is associated both with the production skill it implements and the (possibly several) relevant asset skills on the assets that are taking part in the execution. Whereas a mere matching of production skills with asset skills might come up with non-feasible assignments (whose conditions could not be captured by the skills descriptions available for that domain), the executable skills are known to be successfully executable when triggered as a service provided by the asset.

J. Pfrommer, D. Stogl, K. Aleksandrov, V. Schubert, B. Hein: Modelling and orchestration of service-based manufacturing systems via skills. In: IEEE [International Conference on] Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), 2014: 16 - 19 Sept. 2014, Barcelona, Spain. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, S. 1–4, 2014. [IEEExplore-Link]

Skills are a semantic and manufacturer-independent description of the functionality provided via commands or interfaces of a resource. Skills are thus associated with resources and their contents are described from the perspective of an abstracted resource. With respect to the usage of skills for a task, they also comprise further information about the resource (e.g. work areas of a robot). Skills must be mapped to the elements of the commands or interfaces of a specific resource for the use in the programming system. Skills are distinguished in communication, administrative, and applicative skills [...]

J. Backhaus, G. Reinhart: Digital description of products, processes and resources for task-oriented programming of assembly systems. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, Vol. 28 (8), 2017, S. 1787–1800. [Springer Link]

A skill is a resource-specific process from a supply perspective. In the case of a skill, the states are unknown, or at most bound to certain conditions. The transition f on the other hand is fixed. The description of the transition depends on the initial state. The result of the transition in relation to the initial state is the final state.

Glossary of BaSys 4.2 [Link to glossary document in sharepoint (not yet published)]