Industrial Agents: Emerging Applications of Software Agents in Industry

Paulo Leitão · Stamatis Karnouskos

Mar 2015 · Morgan Kaufmann

About this ebook

Industrial Agents explains how multi-agent systems improve collaborative networks to offer dynamic service changes, customization, improved quality and reliability, and flexible infrastructure. Learn how these platforms can offer distributed intelligent management and control functions with communication, cooperation and synchronization capabilities, and also provide for the behavior specifications of the smart components of the system. The book offers not only an introduction to industrial agents, but also clarifies and positions the vision, on-going efforts, example applications, assessment and roadmap applicable to multiple industries. This edited work is guided and co-authored by leaders of the IEEE Technical Committee on Industrial Agents who represent both academic and industry perspectives and share the latest research along with their hands-on experiences prototyping and deploying industrial agents in industrial scenarios.

• Learn how new scientific approaches and technologies aggregate resources such next generation intelligent systems, manual workplaces and information and material flow system
• Gain insight from experts presenting the latest academic and industry research on multi-agent systems
• Explore multiple case studies and example applications showing industrial agents in a variety of scenarios
• Understand implementations across the enterprise, from low-level control systems to autonomous and collaborative management units

About the author

Paulo Leitão is currently an Associate Professor at Polytechnic Institute of Bragança as well as Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering, where he has taught robotics and automation systems courses. His research includes intelligent and reconfigurable systems, collaborative factory automation, agent-based and holonic control, service-oriented architectures and bio-inspiration engineering. He has published his research more than 100 times in journals including IEEE Intelligent Systems, and Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, and at IEEE conferences on Industrial Electronics, Systems, Self-adaptive Systems, and more. He is the research lead on the project “Grace to develop systems to integrate process and quality control using multi-agent technology.

Stamatis Karnouskos is an expert on the IoT at SAP, Germany. He investigates the added value and impact of emerging technologies in enterprise systems. For over 20 years, he has led efforts in several European Commission and industry-funded projects relate to IoT, Cyber-Physical Systems, Industrie 4.0, manufacturing, smart grids, smart cities, security, and mobility. Stamatis has extensive experience in research and technology management within the industry as well as the European Commission and several national research funding bodies (e.g., in Germany, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Czech Republic, and Greece). He has served on the technical advisory board of the Internet Protocol for Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance and the Permanent Stakeholder Group of the European Network and nformation Security Agency (ENISA).