Agent-Oriented Programming of Manufacturing Control Tasks

The success of agent-oriented concepts in various application domains, in particular in manufacturing control, creates the need for an agent-oriented analysis, design, and programming methodology. This paper presents a program- ming method that covers one step of the necessary methodol- ogy. Given a specification of the tasks to be performed, the method allows to program the corresponding agent in three steps: (i) programming of the individual tasks; (ii) synchro- nization of tasks to avoid concurrency problems; and (iii) specification of script execution on a single processor machine. The programming method was specifically designed for implementing manufacturing control agents and complies with the industrial requirements stated in this paper. 1 Introduction Multi-agent systems has become the key information technology for the next generation of manufacturing control. Motivated by the inability of existing manufacturing systems (i) to deal with the evolution of products and (ii) t..