Application of design pattern within the engineering of agent-based control systems

Abstract

Within production systems. various control decisions have to be taken to ensure a proper system behavior in a distributed but consistent way. To take these control decisions and to ensure the necessary information exchange between them multi-agent systems can be considered for implementation. However. an agent-based control system for a complex production system cannot be implemented in one shot. To overcome this problem two approaches can be successfully applied. On the one hand. a stepwise engineering approach for multi-agent-based control systems solving special control problems and combining them in an appropriate way to a larger agent-based control system can be considered. On the other hand. existing design pattern can be applied to improve the development of the individual multi-agent systems. Within this paper. such a combination will be described.