Assessing the Integration of Software Agents and Industrial Automation Systems with ISO/IEC 25010

Abstract

Agent-technologies have been used for higher-level decision making in addition to carrying out lower-level automation and control functions in industrial systems.Recent research has identified a number of architectural patterns for the use of agents in industrial automation systems but these practices vary in several ways, including how closely agents are coupled with physical systems and their control functions. Such practices may play a pivotal role in the Cyber-Physical System integration and interaction. Hence, there is a clear need for a common set of criteria for assessing available practices and identifying a best-fit practice for a given industrial use case. Unfortunately, no such common criteria exist currently. This work proposes an assessment criteria approach as well as a methodology to enable the use case based selection of a best practice for integrating agents and industrial systems. The software product quality model proposed by the ISO/IEC 25010 family of standards is used as starting point and is put in the industrial automation context. Subsequently, the proposed methodology is applied, and a survey of experts in the domain is carried out, in order to reveal some insights on the key characteristics of the subject matter.

The Applicability of ISO/IEC 25023 Measures to the Integration of Agents and Automation Systems

“…Surely there are no "onesize-fits-all" solutions, but nevertheless, when considering the specific characteristics of most industrial requirements some issues may emerge. For instance, in a small survey [13], carried out among the IEEE P2660.1 working group [18] experts, it emerged that testability is seen as much more important than others (e.g., the user interface aesthetics). However, as seen in Table I, the three proposed measures for assessing testability range from neutral, to good or very good.…”

“…In software systems research, several quality attributes and metrics are studied [10], [11]. Standards, such as ISO/IEC 25010 [12], define several high-level characteristics which are relevant to this context [13]. However, to be able to get a quantifiable assessment, there is a need to check the concrete measures and their calculation as proposed by ISO/IEC 25023 [14] which also belongs to the same standards family.…”

IASelect: Finding Best-fit Agent Practices in Industrial CPS Using Graph Databases

“…Each characteristic is then further separated into multiple sub-characteristics. Subsequently, a survey was conducted with a team of experts in the domain to identify qualities that are most relevant to the field [6]. The survey found that testability, availability, time behavior, interoperability, availability, fault-tolerance and reusability emerged as the most important characteristics for the practices.…”

“…The IEEE P2660.1 standardization project, "Recommended Practices on Industrial Agents: Integration of Software Agents and Low Level Automation Functions", has been working on a methodology to rank and select best-fit Industrial Agent practices for the interfacing between software agents and automation control devices. Previous work was devoted to identifying the patterns derived from a survey of existing implementations of industrial agents [5], and to assess their characteristics, using the ISO/IEC 25010 standards family as a starting point [6].…”

“…Each characteristic is then further separated into multiple sub-characteristics. Subsequently, a survey was conducted with a team of experts in the domain to identify qualities that are most relevant to the field [6].…”