Applying Agents for Engineering of Industrial Automation Systems

Designing, operating and maintaining industrial plants require extensive and complex engineering processes. An integrated engineering process considering all different aspects, data and workflow of plant automation design as well as interoperability to other systems is the key to more efficiency and lower costs of engineering tasks in the plant life cycle. There exists no comprehensive and satisfying solution to this problem today. However, an agentoriented view can lead to fundamentally new and promising approaches to an integrated plant engineering process. The goal of this paper is to clearly identify the specific goals and challenges in engineering industrial plants and to show that agents are a beneficial approach to meet them. To this end, an agentoriented solution for integrated engineering of automation systems is presented, applying the advantages of agent concepts while considering the constraints of existing automation structures.