Agent Programming for Industrial Applications: Some Advantages and Drawbacks
This addresses challenges in industrial automation like dynamism and decentralization, but it is incremental as it assesses existing agent technology in specific domains.
The paper tackled the application of autonomous agents in industrial scenarios, specifically in the gas and oil industry, by developing systems and comparing them with existing automation solutions, highlighting initial results on advantages and drawbacks.
Autonomous agents are seen as a prominent technology to be applied in industrial scenarios. Classical automation solutions are struggling with challenges related to high dynamism, prompt actuation, heterogeneous entities, including humans, and decentralised decision-making. Besides promoting concepts, languages, and tools to face such challenges, agents must also provide high reliability. To assess how appropriate and mature are agents for industrial applications, we have investigated its application in two scenarios of the gas and oil industry. This paper presents the development of systems and the initial results highlighting the advantages and drawbacks of the agents approach when compared with the existing automation solutions.