Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresIn present manufacturing systems, the current challenge is the development of highly reconfigurable, truly distributed solutions. The tendency is to build manufacturing systems with autonomous, intelligent and distributed components that will support reconfiguration and
adaptability. The most promising paradigms for the implementation of such systems are
multi-agents and service oriented architectures (SOA), mainly over the DPWS (Device Profile for Web Services) implementation which was aimed at devices.
An important limitation of most current multi-agent systems is that the management
system is not totally distributed. Failure in the agent responsible for the registry can
overthrow the entire system. DPWS does not have this limitation, since the management
system is totally distributed. However, DPWS does not support agent autonomy notions as
efficiently.
The possibility of creating a truly distributed multi-agent system by linking both approaches led to this thesis. A Middleware layer was developed that enables agents to benefit from DPWS functionalities in order to reach the proposed goal. This middleware layer joins agents, databases, hardware, simulators, human interface applications such as production system management, error correction and maintenance, etc. To prove this concept a 3D model of an agent controlled manufacturing system with transporters augmented with DPWS
communication interfaces was developed
