Common practices for integrating industrial agents and low level automation functions

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.