Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Hybrid Approach for Software Agents in Automation

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are used to increase flexibility and reliability of automated production plants, by reducing their control structure's rigidness through the use of autonomous, interacting software agents. This paper comprises a concept for MAS, which are implemented partly on the Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)-layer and partly on the field device layer, trying to combine the advantages found in other works that used MAS on only one of these layers. The concept contains a software architecture, a communication structure between different runtime platforms (MES and field devices) and processes, including an adaptive path finding algorithm. An evaluation showed that the proposed MAS is comparable in production performance, while increasing fault tolerance compared to a static legacy implementation.