Monitoring and diagnostics of industrial systems using automation agents

An agile monitoring and diagnostic system plays a vital role in manufacturing, since it can considerably increase its robustness and efficiency. Applying agent technology to such systems is recognised as an appropriate approach, providing fault-tolerance and means for failure recovery in the case of sudden anomalies. In this article, we present an automation agent approach with agents comprising a software component with an integrated world model repository besides the related hardware. The world model is an explicit representation of the external surroundings and internals of the agent, and is used to detect anomalies in its own behaviour. We use an ontology to formalise the agent's knowledge. Applicability and functionality of our approach are presented in an example employing a real system.