Publication
Enhancing flexibility in intralogistics 4.0 by using Services, Capabilities, and Skills
Benjamin Blumhofer; Philipp Richard; Tatjana Legler; Martin Ruskowski
In: Procedia Computer Science, Vol. 253, Pages 2377-2388, ELSEVIER, 2025.
Abstract
Manufacturing companies face a dynamic environment shaped by various factors that profoundly affect their production capacities. These factors encompass trends like shortened product life cycles, a surge in product variants, and subsequent reductions in batch sizes. Consequently, companies must adapt their operational capabilities, ensuring existing machinery remains versatile while seamlessly integrating new equipment into their production facilities, following the ”plug and produce” approach. These shifts also reverberate through intralogistics, altering flexibility requirements and methods for individualized goods handling. Despite significant progress in modeling production information using the Capability-Skill-Service model, its application in intralogistics is relatively limited to date. However, given the potential benefits, the integration of this model into both intralogistics and production promises to address one of the key challenges of Industry 4.0: the harmonization of planning and execution processes in production and intralogistics. Closing this gap, this paper proposes an architectural framework that includes core components and information models for a Capability-Skill-Service-based Intralogistics 4.0 application. This framework not only facilitates the seamless integration of intralogistics with production planning and execution, but also lays the foundation for greater flexibility and efficiency in manufacturing. With an implementation the framework and the information models are validated.