Multi-agent Systems in a One-man Operation Measurement Setup

Global competition requires product development cycles to bring technology innovation into new products while consistently shortening time to market. In software industry, new product releases are yearly launched to commercially better exploit technology added value. Such a fast changing scenario makes it very hard for users to get acquainted with newly implemented functionalities. This problem is even more critical in case commercial software - often very technical - is used to simplify complex industrial applications. A typical example in NVH measurement is pass-by-noise testing, where complex test set-up and strict data validation procedures require several expert operators to perform the test. This paper presents a multiagent system that assists a single non-expert test engineer to correctly perform pass-by noise measurement. The proposed solution uses interface agent technology to control the data acquisition system, deal with the complex test set-up and perform automatic and on-line data validation check on measured data.