Browsing by Author "Strasser, Thomas I."
Now showing 1 - 10 of 13
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- Alignment of the IEEE industrial agents recommended practice standard with the reference architectures RAMI4.0, IIRA, and SGAMPublication . Leitão, Paulo; Karnouskos, Stamatis; Strasser, Thomas I.; Jia, Xiaodong; Lee, Jay; Colombo, Armando W.Industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS) are a key element that acts as the backbone infrastructure for realizing innovative systems compliant with the fourth industrial revolution vision and requirements to realize it. Several architectures, such as the reference architectural model industry 4.0 (RAMI4.0), the industrial Internet reference architecture (IIRA), and the smart grid architecture model (SGAM), have been proposed to develop and integrate ICPS, their services, and applications for different domains. In such architectures, the digitization of assets and interconnection to relevant industrial processes and business services is of paramount importance. Different technological solutions have been developed that overwhelmingly focus on the integration of the assets with their cyber counterpart. In this context, the adoption of standards is crucial to enable the compatibility and interoperability of these network-based systems. Since industrial agents are seen as an enabler in realizing ICPS, this work aims to provide insights related to the use and alignment of the recently established IEEE 2660.1 recommended practice to support ICPS developers and engineers to integrate assets in the context of each one of the three referred reference architectures. A critical discussion also points out some noteworthy aspects that emerge when using the IEEE 2660.1 in these architectures and discusses limitations and challenges ahead.
- Analyzing standardization needs for applying agent technology in industrial environmentsPublication . Leitão, Paulo; Strasser, Thomas I.Multi-agent systems can play an important role in the realization of cyber-physical systems by providing intelligence, flexibility, robustness, self-adaptation, and self-organization to them. In spite of the promising perspective offered and concretized by the deployment of multi-agent systems in a few industrial systems and in several laboratory applications, its industrial adoption is far from the expected widely usage. Beside other issues, standardization is being identified as a critical aspect for this status and requires the need to be compliant with existing industrial practices but also a special effort to influence the specifications of existing standards and/or the introduction of new ones. The main objective of this paper is to analyze necessary standardization needs for applying and deploying agent-based technology in industrial environments, addressing industrial requirements imposed by different application fields.
- Assessing the integration of software agents and industrial automation systems with ISO/IEC 25010Publication . Karnouskos, Stamatis; Sinha, Roopak; Leitão, Paulo; Ribeiro, Luis; Strasser, Thomas I.Agent-technologies have been used for higher-level decision making in addition to carrying out lower-level automation and control functions in industrial systems. Recent research has identified a number of architectural patterns for the use of agents in industrial automation systems but these practices vary in several ways, including how closely agents are coupled with physical systems and their control functions. Such practices may play a pivotal role in the Cyber-Physical System integration and interaction. Hence, there is a clear need for a common set of criteria for assessing available practices and identifying a bestfit practice for a given industrial use case. Unfortunately, no such common criteria exist currently. This work proposes an assessment criteria approach as well as a methodology to enable the use case based selection of a best practice for integrating agents and industrial systems. The software product quality model proposed by the ISO/IEC 25010 family of standards is used as starting point and is put in the industrial automation context. Subsequently, the proposed methodology is applied, and a survey of experts in the domain is carried out,in order to reveal some insights on the key characteristics of the subject matter.
- Common practices for integrating industrial agents and low level automation functionsPublication . Leitão, Paulo; Karnouskos, Stamatis; Ribeiro, Luis; Moutis, Panayiotis; Barbosa, José; Strasser, Thomas I.Industrial agent technologies have been integrated in key elements coupling industrial systems and software logic, which is an important issue in the design of cyber-physical systems. Although several efforts have been tried out over the last decades to integrate software agents with physical hardware devices, and some commonalities can be observed among the existing practices, there is no uniform way overall. This work presents an empirical survey of existing practices in three application area, namely factory automation, power & energy systems and building automation. It identifies pertaining common issues and discusses how they integrate low level automation functions by utilizing industrial agents. The surveyed practices reveal high diversity, customized traditional integration focusing mostly on I/O functions, without security, and an overall approach that is mostly coupled rather than embedded.
- A community analysis of the IEEE IES industrial agents technical committeePublication . Ribeiro, Luis; Karnouskos, Stamatis; Leitão, Paulo; Strasser, Thomas I.At the dawn of the 4th industrial revolution, the use of software agents, service-oriented architectures and related technologies as primary constructs of Cyber-Physical Industrial systems is of high relevance. Current developments in this area have been consistently supported by an active community of researchers and practitioners in the past decades. Most of the main actors in the area are members of the IEEE IES Technical Community on Industrial Agents (TCIA). This work analyzes the evolution of this research and development network. It does so by identifying and investigating specialized sub-communities within the larger umbrella of Industrial Agents, their research interests and directions. In total of 7430 documents from 8045 authors were collected from the Google Scholar profiles of the TCIA members. The analysis reveals different research trends, transitions over the years and the emergence of application and domain foci, that are critically discussed.
- Integration patterns for interfacing software agents with industrial automation systemsPublication . Leitão, Paulo; Karnouskos, Stamatis; Ribeiro, Luis; Moutis, Panayiotis; Barbosa, José; Strasser, Thomas I.Agent-based systems, an approach derived from distributed artificial intelligence, have been introduced for designing large complex systems. They are also suitable to solve challenging problems in industrial environments, being an appropriate technologyforrealizingcyber-physicalsystems.Insuchconfiguration, they need to interface with automation and control devices. However, until now there is no widely accepted practice nor pattern to interface the software agents with the automation functions. This work addresses this issue and introduces corresponding integration patterns in order to achieve full interoperability and reusability. This work, therefore, provides a methodology for mappingexistingpracticesintoasetofgenerictemplatesandalso discusses the applicability of the proposed approach to different industrial application domains.
- Multi-agent systems as automation platform for intelligent energy systemsPublication . Leitão, Paulo; Vrba, Pavel; Strasser, Thomas I.The large-scale integration of distributed energy resources into a complex cyber-physical system demands proper automation platforms for monitoring, control, optimization and reconfiguration, addressing intelligent energy systems. This paper discusses the use of multi-agent systems as a suitable solution to address this challenge by analyzing their benefits when applying them to the field of Smart Grids and surveying existing works and initiatives. The principles and use cases established in the MASGrid project illustrate the application of multi-agent technology in active power distribution systems.
- Past, present and future trends in industrial electronics standardizationPublication . Huang, V.K.L.; Bruckner, D.; Chen, C.J.; Leitão, Paulo; Monte, G.; Strasser, Thomas I.; Tsang, K.F.The Standards Group of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) has been active in standards for industrial electronics in recent years, focusing on sensors and sensors networks, real-time industrial communications and industrial agents in the automation fields. It has also participated and collaborated with other IEEE societies such as the Instrumentation and Measurement Society (IMS) in the IEEE 1451 sensor networks standards family, and with government entities such as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This paper gives a brief synopsis of IES standards activities and the trends it sees in industrial electronics standardization in the coming emerging technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT)/Industrial IoT (IIoT), 5G communications, industrial wireless and possibly transportation electrification. All these technologies are expected to be disruptive to the industry in the coming years and standards must be generated to be effective and beneficial to industry and society. The IES Standards Group anticipates more contributions to the IEEE 1451 standards family, industrial agents, industrial wireless applications with NIST, and possibly with standards activities within Industry 4.0 in the coming years.
- Recommendation of best practices for industrial agent systems based on the IEEE 2660.1 standardPublication . Leitão, Paulo; Strasser, Thomas I.; Karnouskos, Stamatis; Ribeiro, Luis; Barbosa, José; Huang, VictorCyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a key concept in Industry 4.0, acting as a backbone to develop smart processes, machines and products. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is a suitable paradigm for the realization of such industrial CPS systems, supporting the distribution of intelligence and decision-making capabilities among a network of autonomous and cooperative agents. Standardization is a key factor for the acceptance of industrial CPS and agent-based systems, assuming a critical role in establishing specifications for the hardware integration, which is an important requirement for industrial agents. This paper focuses on the recently established IEEE 2660.1-2020 standard that defines a recommended practice to solve the interface problem when applying industrial agents, namely integrating intelligent software agents with low-level automation devices in the CPS context. The paper illustrates the applicability of the standard in three different application scenarios related to power and energy systems, factory automation and building automation, and discusses future directions in terms of standardization in the field of industrial agents, that are required for its wider adoption in the realization of industrial CPS solutions.
- A review of agent and service-oriented concepts applied to intelligent energy systemsPublication . Vrba, Pavel; Mařík, Vladimír A.; Siano, Pierluigi; Leitão, Paulo; Zhabelova, Gulnara; Vyatkin, Valeriy; Strasser, Thomas I.The intention of this paper is to provide an overview of using agent and service-oriented technologies in intelligent energy systems. It focuses mainly on ongoing research and development activities related to smart grids. Key challenges as a result of the massive deployment of distributed energy resources are discussed, such as aggregation, supply-demand balancing, electricity markets, as well as fault handling and diagnostics. Concepts and technologies like multiagent systems or service-oriented architectures are able to deal with future requirements supporting a flexible, intelligent, and active power grid management. This work monitors major achievements in the field and provides a brief overview of large-scale smart grid projects using agent and service-oriented principles. In addition, future trends in the digitalization of power grids are discussed covering the deployment of resource constrained devices and appropriate communication protocols. The employment of ontologies ensuring semantic interoperability as well as the improvement of security issues related to smart grids is also discussed. © 2005-2012 IEEE.