PLAP: pini-based lightweight agent platform for industrial environments

Today\´s markets are characterized by increasing turbulence, which forces industrial companies world wide to become more and more flexible. This flexibility is needed in all levels of industry and especially within production. As the corresponding "enabling technologies" for information and communication in such production systems the Internet with connections down to single field devices get into the focus of vendors and end using companies of automation systems (Klostermeyer, A. and Lorentz, K., 2001), (Preschke, J., 2002). With regard to the steadily growing wish for flexibility software agents and plug and participate technologies are going to play an exceptional role. Unfortunately most of the existing agent-systems do not specifically follow the requirements of industrial automation. Due to the often restricted resources of (especially) field devices the need for agent platforms suitable for limited device environments in this context increases more and more. Here different approaches exist in order to meet the requirements and to satisfy the demand. On the one hand, there exist platforms, which are based upon plug and participate technologies, but are not suitable for limited devices. On the other hand, there exist platforms for limited devices, which do not provide common plug and participate capabilities. Hence, there does not exist an agent platform satisfying all requirements at the same time. Therefore, this paper describes such a platform, which is based upon a Jini-like limited device plug and participate technology and thus is suitable also for industrial environments with often limited devices