Platform Independent Multi-Agent System for Robust Networks of Production Systems

The production of customized products requires a flexible production process. Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) are currently seen as one possibility to achieve this goal, since flexibility for the production processes can be achieved by enabling cross-company collaboration. However, to fully implement CPPS for heterogeneous production systems an application and hardware platform independent, robust, and distributed software solution is required. This paper proposes a novel design and implementation for a Multi-Agent System (MAS), that can be used to create application independent CPPS. To support a variety of hardware platforms, the MAS was designed as a lightweight implementation in the programming language ANSI C. The proposed concept was evaluated by different use cases and experiments, which, in a first step, evaluated the efficiency of design and implementation.