Distributed diagnosis and teleservice for automated production cells

In this paper, we present a new concept for future industrial component diagnosis and monitoring (CDM) systems for production cells which are able to use existing CDM programs. The proposed system uses a multi-agent approach to integrate the method of semantically distributed diagnosis. This paper uses the KQML (Knowledge and Query Manipulation language) specification as a communication language for the multi-agent system together with the CORBA standard as the underlying platform to realise the KQML communication. Because the CORBA standard contains the Internet Inter Orb Protocol (IIOP) which is based on TCP/IP as a means of communication, it is possible to use existing Intranets or even the Internet for remote diagnosis or monitoring purposes.