Deployment of industrial agents in heterogeneous automation environments

Cyber-physical systems are an emergent paradigm to design complex, adaptive and smart systems, combining computational applications with physical hardware devices. Multi-agent systems play an important role in such systems to provide flexibility, robustness and adaptation, but their alignment will require the integration of agents with physical devices. This process is usually complex and time consuming due to the proprietary protocols provided by the hardware automation devices. This paper describes the deployment of an agent-based system in a small-scale flexible production system composed by a set of heterogeneous automation devices, such as programmable logic controllers and robots.