Designing cooperating multi-agent systems — An extended design methodology

Within production systems various control decisions have to be taken to ensure a proper system behavior in a distributed but consistent way. Multi-agent systems can be considered as an efficient implementation mean for distributed control architectures. However, an agent-based control system cannot be implemented in a single moment, following a one-shot approach, within a complex production system. To overcome this problem this paper is presenting a step wise engineering approach for agent-based control systems to design multi-agent systems solving special control problems and combining them in an appropriate way to a larger agent-based control system.