CaSkade provides engineering solutions to help creating ontological information models for resources, capabilities and skills. All these solutions aim to integrate seamlessly into engineering workflows and make use of existing engineering artifacts to automatically generate ontology information.

Resources, i.e., devices or machines providing capabilities and skills form the basis of the CaSkade approach. Engineering of new plants typically starts with mechanical engineering of a resource's structure. Using 3D models created during mechanical engineering of resources, CaSkade provides a solution to generate an ontological resource description automatically.

Capabilities can be easily described using natural language. Using the power of large language models, these natural-language descriptions are automatically transformed into our capability ontology. Alternatively, capabilities can also be modeled using fpb.js, a graphical modeling tool to easily define processes according to VDI guideline 3682 (Formalized Process Description). Capabilities modeled with fpb.js can be automatically converted into our capability ontology. See details of our solutions for capability modeling.

Skill engineering is the step in which resource functionality is implemented as a skill and provided with a skill interface. We believe that it's crucial to support this step as it's the most complex one, because the following three requirements must be fulfilled:

  1. A skill's behavior has to implement our state machine
  2. A skill has to provide a skill interface using HTTP or OPC UA that allows to interact with the skill (i.e., start, stop the skill, set / read parameters)
  3. The skill interface has to have an ontological description according to the skill aspect of our capability and skill ontology

We provide multiple solutions for different target platforms to help software developers in correctly implementing the skills of a resource. Take a look at our overview of these skill engineering solutions.