Agent-based Negotiation for Cooperative Transports within Aircraft Production

Multi-agent systems have been used for many decades to solve problems within complex industrial systems. The most common means of coordination is the Contract Net Protocol, a simple yet powerful auction protocol, which has been enhanced by many authors and addressed by different standardization efforts. Autonomous transportation for aircraft production is a particularly challenging area of automation. It necessitates flexible and reliable approaches, including reliable communication and execution of processes for which existing agent frameworks are insufficient. This contribution outlines current efforts within the community to build a ROS2-based agent framework and proposes an applicable capability-modeling approach as well as a suitable negotiation protocol for cooperative transport processes.