Revival of MAS Technologies in Industry

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) were proposed in the mid-1980s to provide a means for control of complex distributed systems. Although the topic received significant attention from the research community, which resulted in many methodologies and theoretical concepts, industrial practitioners’ adoption remained low. A wave of innovations referred to as Industry 4.0 brought new technologies focused on easier integration of heterogeneous systems. Semantic technologies were recognized as a suitable tool for the axiomatic information modelling of production systems, and the OPC-UA communication standard brought a means of secure communication and principles of object-oriented information modelling to the layer of process control. In this paper, a new MAS Platform - Cluster 4.0 Integration Platform is introduced. It utilizes (1) semantics to explicitly describe products, production, and resources for their easier integration and exploitation and (2) OPC-UA to connect software agents to physical machines.