wilamowski-b-m-irwin-j-d-industrial-communication-systems-2011

16-12 Industrial Communication Systems
16.5 agents and Multi-Agent Systems in Industry: Conclusions
The use of agent technology in industrial applications provides several important strengths, namely in terms
of modularity, adaptability, flexibility, robustness, reusability, and reconfigurability (cf. [7,16,39,41,42]).
In contrast to conventional, centralized, top-down, rigid, and static control architectures, agent-based
systems are developed under the fundamental principles of autonomy and cooperation, exploring the distribution
and decentralization of entities and functions, over a bottom-up approach. The agent-based solution
can lead to more simplicity in the debugging, maintenance, adaptability, and scalability of the system.
The robustness of the control system is essentially achieved since this approach does not consider
a central decision element, which means that the loss of one decision component will not cause any
fatal failure of any other decision component. In fact, if production is restructured, example, due to the
occurrence of disturbances, the same negotiation process continues to be executed for, in spite of the
presence of different actors, making the system robust to changes.
Agent-based systems are pluggable systems, allowing changes in production facilities, as the addition,
removal, or modification of hardware equipment as well as software modules, without the need to
stop, reprogram, and reinitialize the system. This feature is crucial to support the current requirements
imposed by customized processing, allowing dynamic system reconfigurability to face the variability of
the demand. The migration or update of old technologies or systems by new ones can also be performed
in a smooth way without the need to stop the system (cf. [7]).
However, in spite of the huge potential of agent-based solutions, its industrial adoption has yet fallen
short of expectations. Several reasons can be identified for this slow industrial adoption, grouped in two
categories: conceptual limitations and technical limitations.
In terms of conceptual limitations, the agent-based paradigm is a new way of thinking that requires a
bit of a paradigm shift from the way manufacturing systems have been realized in the last 100 years. In
fact, as companies have invested a lot of time, effort, and money implementing centralized approaches,
they do not want to change them. Additionally, one of the consensuses that people have about agent
technology is the missing centralized component for decision making, which also causes some obstacles
for the acceptance of these concepts.
In terms of technical limitations, interoperability, robustness, scalability, and reconfiguration mechanisms
remain important issues that may inhibit the wider use of agent-based solutions by industry. Taking
the scalability, for example, the current reported laboratorial prototypes deal with dozens or hundreds
of agents, but industrial applications usually require systems that comprise thousands of agents. Current
platforms cannot handle systems of that size with the robustness required by industry (cf. [7,42]).
The previously identified limitations constitute research opportunities and challenges from which
especially the following ones can be pointed out: benchmarking, interoperability, and development of
engineering frameworks.
In order to proof the maturity and merits of the technology and to convince industry about its applicability
in industrial scenarios, a benchmarking framework is required that provides realistic test cases
that allow evaluating agent-based solutions and comparing them with traditional ones. Some benchmarking
issues remain undefined, namely the selection of proper performance indicators, especially
those that allow to evaluate qualitative indicators, the definition of evaluation criteria, the storage and
maintenance of the best practices, and an easy access to this service.
Interoperability is probably the main technical problem associated to agent technology that should
be addressed. The solution for the interoperability question requires more research on ontologies and
Semantic Web domains and opens a door to the use of service-oriented systems (cf. [39]), combining its
best features with the agent technology.
The specification of formal, structured, and integrated development engineering frameworks is absolutely
needed for the industrial practice in order to support the specification, design, verification, and
implementation of agent-based control applications, allowing an easy, modular, and rapid development/
reconfiguration of control solutions.
© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC