FIPA-ACL based agent communications in plant automation

Intelligent software agent technology is used in plant automation based on distributed system (PABADIS) project to distribute MES functions throughput the automation system and ERP. Communications between PABADIS agents are based on method invocation. The client agent creates the proxy object of server agent and invokes service provided by server agent locally. As a reason that agent communication language is assumed to be able to best handle the inter-agent communication, we try to use agent communication language to implement communications between PABADIS agents. In order to comply with the finished part of project in which Grasshopper is used as agent developing platform, FIPA ACL is adopted. In this paper, we analyze the finished PABADIS communications, present some PABADIS special ACL messages, and implement some communications in FIPA ACL supported by Grasshopper.