Industrial MAS for Planning and Control

In this paper, we summarize advantages of using agent technology in the design and operation of industrial control systems. To support appropriate responses to dynamically generated events, we divided the agent operation into two main levels: planning and real-time control. A higher-level software agent covers the planning phase and low-level distributed control agent provides the real-time control. The proposed architecture is targeted on applications where real-time response is essential but also more sophisticated higher-level control mechanisms are needed for efficient control. An implementation of such system is briefly described.