Agent-based asset administration shell approach for digitizing industrial assets

Modern manufacturing systems are facing new challenges related to the fast-changing market conditions, increased global competition and rapid technological developments, imposing strong requirements in terms of flexibility, robustness and reconfigurability. In this context, the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) paradigm relies on digitizing industrial assets to fulfil these requirements. The implementation of this digitization process is being promoted by the so-called Asset Administration Shell (AAS), a digital representation of an asset that complies with standardization and interoperability strategies. At this moment, a significant part of the AAS developments is more focused on the information management of the asset along its lifecycle and not concerned with aspects of intelligence and collaboration, which are fundamental aspects to develop I4.0 compliant solutions. In this sense, this paper presents an agent-based AAS approach for enhancing the digitization process of assets, considering agents to embed distributed intelligence and collaborative functions, service orientation to support interoperability, and holonic principles to provide the system organization. The proposed agent-based AAS was implemented in an industrial automation system aiming to analyze its applicability.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Diseño y evaluación de una metodología docente en el Grado en Ingeniería Informática para fomentar la empleabilidad y emprendimiento de estudiantes

Memoria ID-067. Ayudas de la Universidad de Salamanca para la innovación docente, curso 2018-2019

Swarm-Based Smart City Platform: A Traffic Application

Smart cities are proposed as a medium-term option for all cities. This article aims to propose an architecture that allows cities to provide solutions to interconnect all their elements. The study case focuses in locating and optimized regulation of traffic in cities. However, thanks to the proposed structure and the applied algorithms, the architecture is scalable in size of the sensor network, in functionality or even in the use of resources. A simulation environment that is able to show the operation of the architecture in the same way that a real city would, is presented

Towards the digitization using asset administration shells

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is promoting the digitization of traditional manufacturing systems towards flexible, reconfigurable and intelligent factories based on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). In this context, the Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0) provides guidelines to develop I4.0 compliant solutions based on industrial standards. As the main RAMI4.0 specification, the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is a standard digital representation of an industrial asset that plays a pivotal role in enabling interoperable communication among I4.0 components across the value chain. This paper provides an analysis of the current state-of-the-art of implementing AAS, discussing, amongst others, the key enabling technologies used to implement the AAS and the alignment of the research works found in the literature with the I4.0 components criteria.This work has been supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UIDB/05757/2020. The author Lucas Sakurada thanks the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal, for the PhD Grant DFA/BD/9234/2020.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Diseño de metodologías docentes para el Grado en Ing. Informática que fomenten la empleabilidad en el marco de la asignatura Nuevas Tecnoogías Emergentes

Memoria ID-0070. Ayudas de la Universidad de Salamanca para la innovación docente, curso 2017-2018

Smart Cities Simulation Environment for Intelligent Algorithms Evaluation

This article presents an adaptive platform that can simulate the centralized control of different smart city areas. For example, public lighting and intelligent management, public zones of buildings, energy distribution, etc. It can operate the hardware infrastructure and perform optimization both in energy consumption and economic control from a modular architecture which is fully adaptable to most cities. Machine-to-machine (M2M) permits connecting all the sensors of the city so that they provide the platform with a perfect perspective of the global city status. To carry out this optimization, the platform offers the developers a software that operates on the hardware infrastructure and merges various techniques of artificial intelligence (AI) and statistics, such as artificial neural networks (ANN), multi-agent systems (MAS) or a Service Oriented Approach (SOA), forming an Internet of Services (IoS). Different case studies were tested by using the presented platform, and further development is still underway with additional case studies

Sistema para la automatización de las Prácticas Externas en el Grado en Ingeniería en Informática

Memoria ID-0051. Ayudas de la Universidad de Salamanca para la innovación docente, curso 2016-2017

A methodology for integrating asset administration shells and multi-agent systems

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is promoting the digitization of industrial environments towards intelligent and distributed industrial automation systems based on Cyber-physical Systems (CPS). Currently, this digitization process is being leveraged by the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), which digitally describes an asset in a standardized and semantically unambiguous form throughout its lifecycle. However, more robust solutions based on autonomous AASs endowed with collaborative and intelligent capabilities, also called proactive AASs, are still in the early stages. In this context, Multi-agent Systems (MAS) are a key enabler to provide the required autonomy, intelligence and collaborative capabilities for the AASs. With this in mind, this paper presents a methodology positioned with respect to the Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0) layers, which provides guidelines for integrating AASs and MAS, aiming to support the development of proactive AASs. The applicability of the proposed methodology was tested through the integration of AASs and MAS for a smallscale CPS demonstrator.The authors are grateful to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal, for financial support through national funds FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) to CeDRI (UIDB/05757/2020 and UIDP/05757/2020) and SusTEC (LA/P/0007/2021). The author Lucas Sakurada thanks the FCT for the PhD Grant 2020.09234.BD.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Engineering a multi-agent systems approach for realizing collaborative asset administration shells

In recent years, there has been a high demand for flexible and reconfigurable processes to meet the fast-changing market conditions. In this context, Industry 4.0 is promoting the digitization of traditional production systems towards intelligent factories with highly automated and rapidly adaptable capabilities based on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS). This digitization process is currently being leveraged by the so-called Asset Administration Shell (AAS), a standardized digital representation of an asset that provides the uniform access to the asset information. Additionally, the AASs offer the digital basis for future autonomous systems, where intelligent AASs may perform collaborative functions to enhance industrial processes. However, currently such solutions are still at an early stage of maturity. In this sense, this paper explores the adoption of a Multi-agent Systems (MAS) approach to provide the required intelligent and collaborative aspects for the traditional AAS. The proposed MAS-based AAS solution was applied in an industrial automation case study to analyze the feasibility of MAS to perform intelligent and collaborative functions in the AAS context.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Digitization of industrial environments through an industry 4.0 compliant approach

About a decade after the introduction of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) as a paradigm oriented towards the digitization of industrial environments, centered on the concept of industrial Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) to enable the development of intelligent and distributed industrial systems, many companies around the world are still not immersed in this digital transformation era. This transition is not straightforward and requires the aligned with the novel technologies, architectures and standards to migrate entire traditional systems into I4.0 systems. In this context, this paper presents an approach to perform the digitization of non-I4.0 components/systems into I4.0 through an approach based on the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), which is a standardized digital representation of an asset. This approach enables to hold the asset information throughout its lifecycle, provides a standard communication interface with the asset, and is based on a set of modules that are combined with the AAS to provide novel functionalities for the asset, e.g., monitoring, diagnosis and optimization. Moreover, this approach adopts Multi-agent Systems (MAS) to provide mainly autonomy and collaborative capabilities to the system. The agents are able to get information from the AASs, making intelligent decisions and perform distributed tasks following interaction strategies, e.g., collaboration, negotiation and self-organization. The feasibility of the proposed approach was tested by digitizing a small-scale production system comprising several assets.The authors are grateful to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal, for financial support through national funds FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) to CeDRI (UIDB/05757/2020 and UIDP/05757/2020) and SusTEC (LA/P/0007/2021). The author Lucas Sakurada thanks the FCT for the PhD Grant 2020.09234.BD.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio