Platform independent Multi-Agent System for Cyber-Physical Production Systems

The production of customized products requires a flexible pro-duction process as well as adaptable production facilities. Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) are currently seen as one possibility to achieve this goal since flexibility for the production processes can be achieved by enabling cross-company collabora-tion. However, the implementation of CPPS for heterogeneous production systems requires an application and hardware plat-form independent, fault-tolerant and distributed software solu-tion. This paper proposes a novel design and implementation for a Multi-Agent System (MAS) that can be used to create applica-tion independent CPPS with arbitrary hardware platforms. To support a broad variety of hardware platforms, the MAS was designed as a lightweight implementation in the programming language ANSI C. The proposed MAS concept was evaluated by different use cases and experiments that evaluated the resource efficiency of the design and implementation.     «

The production of customized products requires a flexible pro-duction process as well as adaptable production facilities. Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) are currently seen as one possibility to achieve this goal since flexibility for the production processes can be achieved by enabling cross-company collabora-tion. However, the implementation of CPPS for heterogeneous production systems requires an application and hardware plat-form independent, fault-tolerant and distributed software...     »