Lot-size-one systems as well as plug and produce concepts imply (1) producing increased variety of products in a highly flexible and timely manner, and (2) making commissioning and maintenance more flexible. The speed with which manufacturers, in particular SMEs, can reconfigure the production to a new run and thus respond to clients and avoid costly machine downtime is critical to maintaining commercial success and profit margins. The manufacturing systems of tomorrow must offer a high degree of autonomy, be quickly re-planned to other operations, and cope with a wide variety of unforeseen situations, in a secure and safe manner. In this context, the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is an emergent standard that leverages the digital twin approach and provides concepts for describing capabilities and skills of I4.0 components in order to automate the reconfiguration process. This article proposes a capability-based operation and engineering approach to tackle the syntactic and semantic interoperability problems in flexible production lines. We demonstrate the implementation of the AAS standard in the open source model-driven workbench Papyrus; then we assess its usability for modeling a production cell use case in order to implement a capability-based reconfiguration approach for flexible production lines.