PPRS: Production skills and their relation to product, process, and resource

To model increasingly adaptive production systems, skills are used to describe generic capabilities of the system components. In this paper, the authors extend the well-known division of production entities into product, process, and resource (PPR) with a skill definition. There are two main advantages for this approach: First, using PPR for the skill definition allows easy integration into existing models and tools. Second, there is a natural tendency to define very generic skills to capture all possible use cases. But at some point, skills have to be translated into precise instructions for execution. The model makes this dichotomy explicit and provides a common taxonomy for stakeholders concerned with skills on different abstraction levels.