A Case Study of Communication in a Distributed Multi- Agent System in a Factory Production Environment

A Distributed Multi-Agent System representing the behaviour of a machine maintenance procedure in a factory production environment is modelled using the BRIC language. The model provides an overview and simplification of the communication in the maintenance procedure. The model involves two distributed factory environments, each equipped with a Maintenance Agent and an Experience Sharing Agent. Maintenance agents can be seen as experts in interpreting local sensor data from the machine being observed. They have some basic domain knowledge about when to bring the findings to the attention of an agent, human or system. An agent is also autonomous and may have the trust to shut down a process. The maintenance agent will ask other agents or humans for assistance if bringing the macine ito working order is beyond the agent’s ability. Necessary information about what maintenance actions to perform is provided by an Experience Sharing Agent which has the ability to identify past experience relevant for the current situation and thus beeing able to help the human to make a better and more informed decision avoiding previously, sometimes very costly mistakes.