An Agent-Oriented Approach to Industrial Automation Systems

Multi-agent systems have been successfully used in a number of industrial applications. However, in the domain of industrial automation systems, little practical experience about the use of agents in such a demanding environment exists. Nowadays automation systems face new challenges and therefore new concepts are needed to meet them. This paper presents a vision of using agents within industrial automation systems from the point of view of automation engineering. To this end, the characteristic structures of automation systems are analyzed and opportunities, as well as advantages, of applying agent-oriented concepts are investigated. A possible approach for the integration of a multi-agent system into existing automation systems is introduced and illustrated by an application example.