Prospecting Tools for Mechatronic Multiagent-based Systems

Notwithstanding the advances in information technologies (IT) and the advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) their concrete application in industry remains elusive. Traditional control technology is still perceived as an advantage and more intelligent systems (IT/AI supported) are envisioned as a second order layer of middle-ware mostly useful for enterprise resource planning tools. Performance and know-how protection are among the topmost arguments that justify the little adherence to a wide range of technical and architectural intelligent solutions significantly proven by consistent research work. To harden the adoption problematic there is often a gap between the academic language, research purposes and requirements and the industry counterparts. In this paper a set of tools are prospected as a mechanism to bridge the gap between pressing industrial requirements and the academic response. In particular the work reflects the authors experience in developing Multiagent Mechatronic Systems in the Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) domain and under the scope of several international research projects namely: EUPASS (FP6), InLife(FP6) and recently IDEAS(FP7).