The future intelligent manufacturing systems should possess a high degree of autonomy, which is able to monitor the entire production process, quickly re-plan operations, and respond to various unforeseen situations in a secure and safe manner. This can achieve rapid response to customers and avoid costly machine downtime, which is crucial to maintaining business success and profitability. The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is an emerging standard in the I4.0 (Industry 4.0) domain. Based on the concept of digital twins, it provides concepts for describing the digital representation of I4.0 assets including their capabilities and skills. The AAS provides also responses to the challenge of syntactic and semantic interoperability that the flexible and autonomous production lines are facing. In this article, we propose a capability-based operation and engineering approach for flexible production lines. Our approach is relying on the AAS standard which is a very wide and rich specification. Consequently, we describe the subset of AAS modelling concepts necessary for our approach, we clarify their semantics and we show their usage through a production cell use case. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these modelling concepts were tooled as an extension of the open source model-driven workbench Papyrus.