Vladimir Marik

Industrial adoption of agent-based technologies

We developed new class of approaches to manufacturing and supply chain decision making. These approaches employ multiagent systems, which consist of a set of intelligent agents hosted on an appropriate software platform. Agent-based technology can potentially solve complex, dynamic decision processes that are distributed. By enabling networks of autonomous yet interacting reasoning elements, this technology provides an alternative to the centralized systems prevailing in industry.

A Review of Architectures and Concepts for Intelligence in Future Electric Energy Systems

Renewable energy sources are one key enabler to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and to cope with the anthropogenic climate change. Their intermittent behavior and limited storage capabilities present a new challenge to power system operators to maintain power quality and reliability. Additional technical complexity arises from the large number of small distributed generation units and their allocation within the power system. Market liberalization and changing regulatory framework lead to additional organizational complexity. As a result, the design and operation of the future electric energy system have to be redefined. Sophisticated information and communication architectures, automation concepts, and control approaches are necessary in order to manage the higher complexity of so-called smart grids. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art and recent developments enabling higher intelligence in future smart grids. The integration of renewable sources and storage systems into the power grids is analyzed. Energy management and demand response methods and important automation paradigms and domain standards are also reviewed.

Past, Present, and Future of Industrial Agent Applications

Industrial agents technology leverages the benefits of multiagent systems, distributed computing, artificial intelligence techniques and semantics in the field of production, services and infrastructure sectors, providing a new way to design and engineer control solutions based on the decentralization of control over distributed structures. The key drivers for this application are the benefits of agent-based industrial systems, namely in terms of robustness, scalability, reconfigurability and productivity, all of which translate to a greater competitive advantage. This manuscript monitors the chronology of research and development of the industrial applications of multiagent and holonic systems. It provides the comprehensive overview of methodologies, architectures and applications of agents in industrial domain from early nineties up to present. It also gives an outlook of the current trends as well as challenges and possible future application domains of industrial agents.

Rockwell Automation's Holonic and Multiagent Control Systems Compendium

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of long-term R&D activities of the Rockwell Automation (RA) company in the field of holonic and agent-based manufacturing control systems. It presents a coherent framework of methodologies for designing agent-based control systems, tools that support implementation and validation of them, and agent applications that were developed for various industrial systems. The common attribute is the integration of novel techniques, such as multiagent systems or semantics with the current “old-fashioned” automation architectures represented mainly by programmable logic controllers. Retaining the ability of the control system to meet the strict real-time constraints and concurrently raise its intelligence has always been of highest importance. The paper does not focus merely on RAs work, but discusses all its aspects in a context of other existing works in this area.

A Review of Agent and Service-Oriented Concepts Applied to Intelligent Energy Systems

The intention of this paper is to provide an overview of using agent and service-oriented technologies in intelligent energy systems. It focuses mainly on ongoing research and development activities related to smart grids. Key challenges as a result of the massive deployment of distributed energy resources are discussed, such as aggregation, supply-demand balancing, electricity markets, as well as fault handling and diagnostics. Concepts and technologies like multiagent systems or service-oriented architectures are able to deal with future requirements supporting a flexible, intelligent, and active power grid management. This work monitors major achievements in the field and provides a brief overview of large-scale smart grid projects using agent and service-oriented principles. In addition, future trends in the digitalization of power grids are discussed covering the deployment of resource constrained devices and appropriate communication protocols. The employment of ontologies ensuring semantic interoperability as well as the improvement of security issues related to smart grids is also discussed.

Ontologies for multi-agent systems in manufacturing domain

Ontologies play important role in knowledge sharing and exploration, particularly in communication in multi-agent systems. We briefly survey, compare and analyze current usage of ontologies in the area of manufacturing and compare it with the ontology modelling for the Semantic Web. We focus on the problem of scalable interoperability in open heterogeneous multi-agent systems, such as supply chains. A study of transformation of a particular ontology from the manufacturing domain into the form suitable for communication with Semantic Web agents is presented. We conclude with a discussion of what we see as the next important steps in the development of ontologies in the manufacturing domain in order to have more automated approaches for ontological knowledge integration.

Capabilities of Dynamic Reconfiguration of Multiagent-Based Industrial Control Systems

This paper focuses on reconfiguration aspects of agent-based industrial control systems. Reconfiguration is the ability of the control system to modify its behavior to cope with unusual conditions and changes of the production environment like machine breakdowns, product innovations, rush orders, etc. This paper presents a multiagent system dedicated to material flow control-manufacturing agent simulation tool (MAST)-and discusses in detail how agents efficiently cope with the dynamic reconfiguration. Two scenarios are discussed: 1) the automatic reconfiguration of the transportation paths carried out by agents in case of failures and 2) the structural reconfiguration enabling online addition, removal, or reconnection of equipment or transportation paths on the factory floor. Two proof-of-concept applications of MAST in University of Cambridges and Vienna University of Technologys testbeds are described.

A knowledge-based approach to coalition formation

Establishing coalitions among humanitarian aid organizations is a challenge. The CPlanT (Coalition Planning Tool) system uses a multi-agent knowledge-based approach to reduce complexity and communication traffic, while also protecting stakeholder privacy.

Review article: Developments in dynamic and intelligent reconfiguration of industrial automation

This paper provides an overview of current techniques to allow the industrial systems to automatically adapt to change while maintaining predictable and stable system behaviour. This is performed along the dimensions of simple, dynamic and intelligent reconfiguration and focuses on the physical device and software component levels of the shop floor and in particular, on automatic reconfiguration of programmable logic controller systems. Through an analysis of recent work by the authors and others in this area, the paper identifies the basic requirements for intelligent reconfiguration and the outstanding issues in this area.

Software agents for process monitoring and notification

Safety and efficiency are primary concerns in chemical processing facilities, though the complexity of many such systems often makes it difficult for operators to detect abnormal conditions before they compromise throughput or become hazardous. In this paper, we report initial results from the application of multi-agent systems to monitor complex chemical processes and flexibly and appropriately notify key plant personnel about off-nominal conditions.