Towards user-oriented programming of skill-based automation systems using a domain-specific meta-modeling approach

Upcoming trends in manufacturing focus on flexible configuration of products up to lot-size one. This mass customization raises a need of flexible manufacturing and production systems that should react on fast changing market demands. As a result, it is getting more and more important to model all needed assets or skills in an user-oriented and configurable manner. Assets can represent any type of data or skill information needed in a manufacturing domain. Data information could be for example shown to a human worker (e.g. work instructions, images, videos or animations) or could be required by robots (e.g. coordinates, velocities). Skill information represent any type of executable functionality provided by a device. This paper shows a generic approach to model needed context information of (collaborative) manufacturing tasks. This approach supports skill-based engineering enabling the usage of various components from different vendors. In addition, this work presents a domain-specific modeling approach of skills including the definition and validation of custom modeling rules.