Agent-based reconfiguration at controller level

Current automation systems need to be able to cope with the continuously changing requirements of the applications in terms of complexity, extensibility and dynamism. To match these challenging requirements, modern automation systems need to incorporate new software engineering techniques. These techniques must provide to the automation systems additional abilities such as diagnosis and reconfiguration. This paper describes an approach for the design of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) based supervisory architecture towards the design of reconfigurable automation systems; the reconfigured system will meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In particular, in this paper the core of the supervisory architecture is presented. It is based on refreshing states and moving functionalities among the Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). Besides, the agents negotiate if a PLC failure is detected.