“…Figure 1 shows part of the MAS and a schematic overview of some of the various information that can be exchanged between the QCA, the product tracking agent (PTA) and the product agent (PA), which are associated to the product type and to the individual product item, respectively, the independent meta-agent (IMA), which is associated to the whole production line, and the other resource agents (RA), which are associated to each process/machinery; altogether, these agents comprise the MAS. 13 The innovations of the particular example discussed here over standard machine vision systems 14 consist in developing self-optimizing strategies that allow the QCS to embed the complex behaviors of an agent, 15 so as to become an autonomous node of a MAS operating in the manufacturing plant. The context and the specific problem addressed to demonstrate these concepts are reported in the section ''The Robotized QCS'', including the hardware of the robot vision system, camera and illuminator.…”