Rising demands to smaller lot sizes and more flexibility in production processes inspired the idea of selforganising production by the use of "intelligent" parts. This is achieved by self-sustaining wireless nodesProcess-eGrains -to transfer the production control and logic from a centralised approach to a distributed logic. This paper will show the requirements in an industrial environment from an application perspective to these nodes. We present the middleware design implemented on an agent-driven architecture. Abstracting from different hardware it provides a unified interface for storing and processing information independently and locally and negotiate among each other. The application is exemplified through a part driven assembly.
The MicroJIAC team has participated in the Multi-Agent Programming Contest 2007 with some success. This year, we attended again. Our contest contribution was implemented by a student during a university course using the current version of our agent framework. Unlike the gold mining scenario of MAPC 2007, this year's cow herding scenario had higher complexity and was a very good testbed to evaluate our new agent framework.
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