Industrial MAS for Planning and Control
Proceedings of the 9th ECCAI-ACAI/EASSS 2001, AEMAS 2001, HoloMAS 2001 on Multi-Agent-Systems and Applications II-Selected Revised Papers
DEXA '02 Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications
The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Experience with holonic and agent-based control systems and their adoption by industry
HoloMAS'05 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing
A strategy to implement and validate industrial applications of holonic systems
HoloMAS'05 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing
Distributed control of production systems
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
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This paper presents a design of a process automation system extended with multi-agent systems (MAS) and experiments with its implementation. According to this design, MAS can be used to extend the functionality of ordinary process automation systems at higher levels of control. Anticipated benefits of this include enhanced reconfigurability, responsiveness and flexibility of the resulting automation system. The design also takes into account particular characteristics of process automation. An agent platform for process automation is presented as a basis for applying MAS. A FIPA-compliant agent platform is extended with process automation specific functionality. The platform utilizes a hierarchical agent organization and a BDI-agent model. Two applications are implemented using the platform. One of these shows how the techniques of distributed planning can be applied in discrete control. The other provides a model for supervisory continuous control using the techniques of distributed search. Experiments performed with a laboratory test environment using the applications are presented. They are able to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in test scenarios.