Agent-based Solutions for Industrial Environments composed of Autonomous Mobile Agents, Modular Agent Platforms, and Tuple Spaces.

Abstract

Design and Production processes become more and more complex. Today, industrial manufacturing environments consists of large-scale networks connecting smart sensors, embedded systems, server, desktop, and mobile computers. Mobile software Agents can be used in such strong heterogeneous environments with design, manufacturing, and logistics facilities. A unified agent model and a agent processing platform can overcome network and system barriers arising in such complex systems. The deployment of Industrial Agents can improve the scalability, productivity, and stability of modern adaptive and customized production processes, and aid the integration of sensor networks in cloud computing. This article shows the deployment and the relationship of industrial agents to industrial environments and common agent models, finally mapped on mobile program code executed by a low-resource and highly portable agent processing platform.