Capability-based emerging organization of autonomous agents for flexible production control

Flexible structures in the manufacturing domain are of increasing concern. Nowadays, distributed systems for the coordination, management, and control of highly heterogeneous manufacturing structures are under research and development. However, their flexibility is restricted by two main aspects: On the one hand, in the design step of the system designers are implementing mostly static communication and reasoning skills for distributed software systems. On the other hand, knowledge on solutions provided by machine tools are implemented implicitly, i.e., the software system representing a machine tool can only reason on capabilities for a solution with respect to the capabilities implemented by the designer.In this paper we will propose an innovative approach to dynamic capability management enabling software agents to reason on their capabilities and dynamically create capabilities as solutions.