Using intelligent agents for distributed measurements

Users of industrial software applications suffer from fast development cycles, and cannot keep up with the increasing complexity. However, an intelligent agent system assist the user in managing these complex environments by interaction of service-offering and service-requesting agents. This paper proposes such a multiagent framework that applies to a distributed measurement task in the structural testing domain. We define such a task as a setting in which both the objects under measurement as well as the users are physically spread out over the entire globe. The complexity of performing such complicated measurements and its coordination can be controlled by a multiagent system. The proposed framework outlines how a society of agents manage the entire data acquisition system. It coordinates its use by auction scheduling, and it presents an ontology that publishes the framework to the outside world. It is shown that the use of such service-offering agents in a distributed measurement setting is a feasible solution to encapsulate the complexity of industrial applications. This is shown based on a practical real-life measurement scenario.