Capabilities and Skills in Manufacturing: A Survey Over the Last Decade of ETFA

TL;DR

This paper surveys the last decade of ETFA conference papers to provide an overview of capabilities and skills in manufacturing, highlighting research trends, characteristics, gaps, and future opportunities in the context of Industry 4.0.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive overview of capability- and skill-based manufacturing systems based on a systematic review of 34 relevant papers from ETFA over ten years.

Findings

Identified key characteristics of capabilities and skills in manufacturing.

Highlighted research gaps and future opportunities.

Provided a structured overview of the field.

Abstract

Industry 4.0 envisions Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs) to foster adaptive production of mass-customizable products. Manufacturing approaches based on capabilities and skills aim to support this adaptability by encapsulating machine functions and decoupling them from specific production processes. At the 2022 IEEE conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), a special session on capability- and skill-based manufacturing is hosted for the fourth time. However, an overview on capability- and skill based systems in factory automation and manufacturing systems is missing. This paper aims to provide such an overview and give insights to this particular field of research. We conducted a concise literature survey of papers covering the topics of capabilities and skills in manufacturing from the last ten years of the ETFA conference. We found 247 papers with a notion on capabilities and skills and identified and analyzed 34 relevant papers which met this survey's inclusion criteria. In this paper, we provide (i) an overview of the research field, (ii) an analysis of the characteristics of capabilities and skills, and (iii) a discussion on gaps and opportunities.