Integration of distributed hybrid multi-agent systems into an industrial IT environment: Improving interconnectivity of industrial IT systems to the shop floor

Due to fierce competition, short product lifecycles and fluctuating markets, there is an increasing demand for flexible and fault tolerant systems in automated manufacturing. Multi-Agent System (MAS) can help meeting these demands by enabling fast reconfigurations and smart fault handling and compensation. A previously developed MAS, distributed on real time and non-real time capable platforms, can increase these benefits by combining the advantages of both, real time and non-real time implementations of MAS when involved in controlling (a part of) a manufacturing plant. Even though different communication concepts have been developed and are provided within this MAS architecture, connections to other industrial IT systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or third party MAS implementations have not been included. To enable maximizing the system's flexibility, a complete immersion of the MAS into the industrial IT environment needs to be provided. This paper proposes communication concepts, a running example and evaluation of the concepts for this problem.