Luis Ribeiro

MAS and SOA: Complementary Automation Paradigms

This document surveys existing research in emergent concepts and technologies supporting the establishment of what are expected to be future automation systems. Multiagent systems (MAS) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are currently the most promising concepts in this matter. The authors experience in the implementation and study of SOA and MAS for distributed automation systems suggests that there are substantial benefits in converging both paradigms and technologies In this context, the goal of the present work is to unveil their strengths and weaknesses and propose the unification of complementary features as a mean to provide unprecedented support to the study, modelling, design and implementation of complex distributed systems.

Smart Agents in Industrial Cyber–Physical Systems

Future industrial systems can be realized using the cyber-physical systems (CPSs) that advocate the coexistence of cyber and physical counterparts in a network structure to perform the systems functions in a collaborative manner. Multiagent systems share common ground with CPSs and can empower them with a multitude of capabilities in their efforts to achieve complexity management, decentralization, intelligence, modularity, flexibility, robustness, adaptation, and responsiveness. This work surveys and analyzes the current state of the industrial application of agent technology in CPSs, and provides a vision on the way agents can effectively enable emerging CPS challenges.

Evolvable production systems : An integrated view on recent developments

Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) is a fundamentally new paradigm to design, maintain and evolve industrial systems. It is a holistic approach supporting product/shop floor co-evolution and ensuring a tailored and balanced solution for sustainable enterprise development. Its core is engineered by distributed intelligence materialized in proactive and interacting shop floor assets. These intelligent building blocks include a wise interface design that ensures plug-ability and promotes system integration and bio-inspired interaction mechanisms (control and monitoring/diagnosis) to emerge a consistent self-organizing response to production disturbances. In this article a short survey on recent technical and theoretical developments supporting the EPS paradigm is held.

Diagnosis using Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an emergent approach to industrial control that accompanies new industrial paradigms in the response to the continuously changing socio-economic challenges posed to modern and future enterprises. Maximizing the profit under adverse market conditions is also a matter of cost cut and the use of distributed and intelligent devices with efficient diagnosis mechanisms can help improving equipments uptime either by reacting before a breakdown or recovering gracefully from failures.

Supporting agile supply chains using a service-oriented shop floor

The globalized nature of current business environments led to the emergence of new networked enterprise organizational paradigms (supply chains, extended enterprises, virtual enterprises, collaborative networks, etc.) to meet changing requirements and tackle profitable but volatile opportunities overall agility is required. Eventually the shop floor will have to react and accommodate (re)adjustments in the supply chain making it an important piece in the competitiveness puzzle. So far, the research focus has been in high level aspects of supply chain management and the integration of shop floor activities in the process has been left relatively unattended. However, shop floor data is increasingly required in business tools that support decision making. In this context, failing to support agility at shop floor level can compromise the agility of the supply chain. Recent developments in networked information technologies and embedded devices allow enabling intelligence in shop floor rendering it an active and live entity that further enhances the dynamics of the supply chain. The goal of the present work, supported by an implemented test case in the assembly domain, is to demonstrate how one is able to seamless integrate the shop floor with external tools and achieve a highly reconfigurable environment that adapts to changing production requirements and disturbances using service-oriented technology.

An Agent Based Framework to Support Plug And Produce

The new market trends are very different, so it is crucial to the companies improve the tools and capabilities that allow themselves readjust rapidly and effectively to the news market changes and to the new requirements. In order to facilitate this process, it is proposed in this paper an agent based implementation that can provide to the existent systems the capacity to quickly adapt and reconfigure using standard technology. The proposed framework provides an intelligent tool to autonomously help the configuration when a production operator pretends to introduce a new variant of product in runtime and consult important information provided by the system to monitor execution.

A generic communication interface for DPWS-based web services

To withstand future socio-economic challenges new approaches to industrial control have emerged. These methodologies require however the underlying systems to be fully integrated from an information technology point of view. Not all existing distributed technologies have proven successful in managing interoperability constraints. The research in service oriented architectures has shown promising results in managing information exchange between heterogeneous systems and in hiding their complexity by providing platform agnostic service descriptions. However in highly dynamic systems where changes are to happen in runtime implementation issues arise. Typically the heterogeneity of most systems causes reprogramming to happen periodically to accommodate changes and the dimension of the code often boosts. This paper addresses this problematic presenting a generic communication interface for web services that contributes to ease these problems.

Self-organization in automation - the IDEAS pre-demonstrator

While the application of IT in automation gains traction, mostly motivated by the introduction of Service Orientated Approaches and Multiagent modelling, it is sometimes unclear to practitioners what is the full potential and boundaries of such concepts and technologies. The FP7 IDEAS project is focused in the design and development of Multiagent systems in a Mechatronic context which, to a great extent, implies that Mechatronic Agents must consider and respect mechanical/physical constraints while delivering the widely acknowledged (yet elusively demonstrated) characteristics that may render Agent-based control unique in respect to tolerance to disturbances, plug-ability and scalability. In this context, the present paper details the preliminary proof of concept prototype that validates the IDEAS Mechatronic Agent Architecture. The focus of this early demonstrator is to enlighten on how self-organization, inspired by the Evolvable Assembly System (EAS) Paradigm, can be exploited towards promoting the above mentioned characteristics. The main lessons learned, open points and future developing directions are distilled as the prototype is presented.

An agent-based interaction-oriented shop floor to support emergent diagnosis

The emerging production paradigms, potentiated by the advances in Information Technologies (IT), especially in web related standards and technologies as well as the progressive acceptance of the multiagent systems (MAS) concept and related technologies, envision collections of modules whose individual and collective function adapts and evolves ensuring the fitness and adequacy of the shop floor in tackling profitable but volatile business opportunities. Despite the richness of the interactions and the effort set in modeling them, their potential to favor fault propagation and interference, in these complex environments, has been ignored from a diagnostic point of view. To avoid corrupting the distributed nature of the system any diagnostic method/tool should necessarily adapt and evolve. This implies that the diagnostic model should emerge in system rather than being imposed. In the present paper the authors contend that there is added value in further considering interactions and modeling the network effect of interactions for the purpose of diagnosing the system. In this context, an agent-based architecture is proposed to support an emergent diagnostic model.

An Axiomatic Design of a Multiagent Reconfigurable Mechatronic System Architecture

In recent years, the fields of reconfigurable manufacturing systems, holonic manufacturing systems, and multiagent systems have made technological advances to support the ready reconfiguration of automated manufacturing systems. While these technological advances have demonstrated robust operation and been qualitatively successful in achieving reconfigurability, their ultimate industrial adoption remains limited. Among the barriers to adoption has been the relative absence of formal and quantitative multiagent system design methodologies based on reconfigurability measurement. Hence, it is not clear that the degree to which these designs have achieved their intended level of reconfigurability, which systems are indeed quantitatively more reconfigurable, and how these designs may overcome their design limitations to achieve greater reconfigurability in subsequent design iterations. To our knowledge, this paper is the first multiagent system reference architecture for reconfigurable manufacturing systems driven by a quantitative and formal design approach. It is rooted in an established engineering design methodology called axiomatic design for large flexible engineering systems and draws upon design principles distilled from prior works on reconfigurability measurement. The resulting architecture is written in terms of the mathematical description used in reconfigurability measurement, which straightforwardly allows instantiation for system-specific application.