Smart Agents in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

Future industrial systems can be realized using the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that advocate the co-existence of cyber and physical counterparts in a network structure to perform the system’s functions in a collaborative manner. MultiAgent systems share common ground with CPS and can empower them with a multitude of capabilities in their efforts to achieve complexity management, decentralization, intelligence, modularity, flexibility, robustness, adaptation, and responsiveness. This work surveys and analyzes the current state of the industrial application of agent technology in CPS, and provides a vision on the way agents can effectively enable emerging CPS challenges.