This is the first part of a two-part paper that has arisen from the work of the IEEE Power Engineering Society's Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) Working Group. Part I of this paper examines the potential value of MAS technology to the power industry. In terms of contribution, it describes fundamental concepts and approaches within the field of multi-agent systems that are appropriate to power engineering applications. As well as presenting a comprehensive review of the meaningful power engineering applications for which MAS are being investigated, it also defines the technical issues which must be addressed in order to accelerate and facilitate the uptake of the technology within the power and energy sector. Part II of this paper explores the decisions inherent in engineering multi-agent systems for applications in the power and energy sector and offers guidance and recommendations on how MAS can be designed and implemented.

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Multi-Agent Systems for Power Engineering Applications—Part I: Concepts, Approaches, and Technical Challenges

Future industrial systems can be realized using the cyber–physical systems (CPSs) that advocate the coexistence of cyber and physical counterparts in a network structure to perform the system’s functions in a collaborative manner. Multiagent systems share common ground with CPSs and can empower them with a multitude of capabilities in their efforts to achieve complexity management, decentralization, intelligence, modularity, flexibility, robustness, adaptation, and responsiveness. This work surveys and analyzes the current state of the industrial application of agent technology in CPSs, and provides a vision on the way agents can effectively enable emerging CPS challenges.

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Smart Agents in Industrial Cyber–Physical Systems

An encoded information reading (EIR) terminal can comprise a microprocessor electrically coupled to a system/data bus, a memory communicatively coupled to the microprocessor, an EIR device, a multi-band antenna, and a wireless communication interface. The EIR device can be provided by a bar code reading device, an RFID reading device, or a card reading device. The EIR device can be configured to output raw message data containing an encoded message and/or output decoded message data corresponding to an encoded message. The wireless communication interface can comprise a radio frequency (RF) front end electrically coupled to the multi-band antenna. The RF front end can comprise a micro-electromechanical (MEMS) filter array including one or more band-pass filter. Each band-pass filter of the MEMS filter array can be electrically coupled to a bias voltage source or an oscillating signal source. The RF front end can be electrically coupled to an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter and/or to a digital-to-analog (D/A) converter. The wireless communication interface can be configured to transmit radio signals in two or more frequency regulatory domains and/or receive radio signals in two or more frequency regulatory domains. The multi-band antenna can in one embodiment be provided by a meta-material antenna.

Encoded information reading terminal with micro-electromechanical radio frequency front end

This paper reports on industrial deployment of multi-agent systems and agent technology. It provides an overview of several application domains and an in-depth presentation of four specific case studies. The presented applications and deployment domains have been analyzed. The analysis indicates that despite strong industrial involvement in this field, the full potential of the agent technology has not been fully utilized yet and that not all of the developed agent concepts and agent techniques have been completely exploited in industrial practice. In the paper, the key obstacles for wider deployments are listed and potential future challenges are discussed.

Industrial deployment of multi-agent technologies: review and selected case studies

Industrial agents technology leverages the benefits of multiagent systems, distributed computing, artificial intelligence techniques and semantics in the field of production, services and infrastructure sectors, providing a new way to design and engineer control solutions based on the decentralization of control over distributed structures. The key drivers for this application are the benefits of agent-based industrial systems, namely in terms of robustness, scalability, reconfigurability and productivity, all of which translate to a greater competitive advantage. This manuscript monitors the chronology of research and development of the industrial applications of multiagent and holonic systems. It provides the comprehensive overview of methodologies, architectures and applications of agents in industrial domain from early nineties up to present. It also gives an outlook of the current trends as well as challenges and possible future application domains of industrial agents.

Past, Present, and Future of Industrial Agent Applications

This paper describes LS/ATN, Living Systems®Adaptive Transportation Networks, an agent-based solution we have developed to solve transportation problems in the charter business logistics. LS/ATN provides automatic optimization and execution capabilities that extend the existing planning systems accordingly. To describe our solution and analyse its performance, we report on a real case scenario in which transportation requests of a big logistics provider were optimized. Besides describing the agent approach and the LS/ATN features we stress the necessity to integrate such agent system into a real-world IT architecture. Finally, we show that our adaptive solution produces significantly better results in real case scenarios than what achieved with manual optimization of professional dispatchers.

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An adaptive solution to dynamic transport optimization

The problem of action selection by autonomous agents becomes increasingly difficult when acting in continuous, non-deterministic and dynamic environments pursuing multiple and possibly conflicting goals. We propose a method that exploits additional information gained from continuous states, is able to deal with unexpected situations, and takes multiple and conflicting goals into account including additional motivational aspects such as dynamic goals, which allow for situation-dependent motivational influence on the agent. Further we show some domain independent properties of this algorithm along with empirical results gained using the RoboCup simulated soccer environment.

https://ijcai.org/Proceedings/99-2/Papers/080.pdf

Behavior networks for continuous domains using situation-dependent motivations

Agent technology provides industrial-applications developers with new abstractions for distributed-system development, new methodological tools, and a set of algorithms for creating autonomous, collaborative systems. Over the past few years, a number of industrial applications have deployed agents. However, a substantial gap still exists between the cutting-edge research carried out mainly in university laboratories and research institutes and the domain-specific industrial applications that commercial organizations develop. This article gives some indication of agent technology's readiness for commercial deployment, based primarily on the presentations and discussions at the inaugural Industry Track of AAMAS 2005 - the Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.

Agents in industry: the best from the AAMAS 2005 industry track

In this paper we describe our approach for an efficient design and implementation of multi-agent systems using agent oriented methodologies and tools. We demonstrate the strength of this approach taking the example of the TAC domain. The trading agent competition (TAC) is a challenging e-marketplace domain for autonomous auction agents. The development process turned out to be very effective with respect to time and success and with the living agents team finishing as the highest scoring team.

Agent-oriented software engineering for successful TAC participation

A considerable volume of research exists concerning the domain of automatic planning and scheduling, but many real-world scheduling problems, and especially that of transportation logistics, remain difficult to solve. In particular, this domain demands schedule-solving for every vehicle in a transportation fleet where pick-up and delivery of customer orders is distributed across multiple geographic locations, while satisfying time-window constraints on pickup and delivery per location. This paper presents a successful commercial-grade solution to this problem called Living Systems Adaptive Transportation Networks (LS/ATN), which has been proven through real-world deployment to reduce transportation costs through the optimization of route solving for both small and large fleets. LS/ATN is a novel agent-based resource management and decision system designed to address this highly dynamic and complex domain in commercial settings. We show how LS/ATN employs agent cooperation algorithms to derive truck schedules that optimize the use of available resources leading to significant cost savings. The solution is designed to support, rather than replace, the day-to-day activities of human dispatchers.

Klaus Dorer

Papers

An adaptive solution to dynamic transport optimization

Behavior networks for continuous domains using situation-dependent motivations

Agents in industry: the best from the AAMAS 2005 industry track

Agent-oriented software engineering for successful TAC participation

LS/ATN: Reporting on a Successful Agent-Based Solution for Transport Logistics Optimization