A community analysis of the IEEE IES industrial agents technical committee

At the dawn of the 4
^th
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.